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Comment by geppetto | Hacker News Reader

Really nice project!

A side note on the chassis. It's similar - not the same - to the ones I've been using in high school classes for a few years. I've bought mine off amazon/ebay for 15$ and while they're good enough to get started they have several weak points: motors are undersized, power supply is too low for 5V boards, assembly is not so good with parts not fitting well. They're certainly not an example of good design. Unfortunately I couldn't find any better option in the sub 100$ range with two DC motors so I understand why OP chose something similar. Does anybody know of a better chassis for these kind of projets?

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I got this Arduino bot for $70. Has its own battery for sufficient power. The motor gearing is a bit fast, so it's better to use PWM to slow down the motors, except the default pinout disables PWM on the drive gpios when the servo is enabled. The build quality is ok, except there are no spacers for the bolts between the PCBs and acrylic base, so I worry about damaging the PCB during assembly.

https://www.amazon.com/Elegoo-Four-wheel-Ultrasonic-Intellig...

Li-ion battery is much better but I don't need an Arduino board nor sensors - we've plenty of - and I don't get the 4 motors design... more problems and no particular gains.

Al these kits and chassis look like a different mix of the same - not so good - parts.

Disclaimer up front: I have a significant interest in this company and product, so I'm definitely pimpin' my own sauces. :)

With that said, we[0] build a product called MRK-1 which is a programmable autonomous robot built using a custom board we developed using similar technology to Arduino. Our kits are around $100, very simple to build an operate, and we have a sweet textbook written by some awesome guy named blister[1]. :D

We're geared more towards selling to individual schools and school districts, but if you're interested, I can hook you up with a kit and a digital copy of the programming book.

0: http://sumorobotleague.com

1: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Robot-Programming-Robots...

It's an interesting product but I need vanilla Arduino and off-the-shell parts. We build one different robot a year as a final project after a few months experimenting with simpler circuits and components.

We basically are vanilla Arduino and off-the-shelf parts. All our board does is combine the Atmega 328 with a motor controller and has some IR sensors pre-soldered onto the board. The motors, sensors, and even some IO headers are just generic 5v pins.

You program our board using the Arduino IDE and can configure the actual robot any way you want. :)

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