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Do you might have a couple of Nomadic Applied sciences N150 robots sitting round that you’re not positive what to do with? Likelihood is that you don’t, as a result of these robots haven’t been manufactured for nearly 25 years, they usually had been area of interest machines at the moment. They had been initially focused at researchers finding out robotic exploration issues, like get a robotic to unravel a maze. As of late you are able to do that simply sufficient with an Arduino or Raspberry Pi and a cheap robotics platform, however within the Nineties, it required some leading edge {hardware}.

Though you most likely shouldn’t have the great fortune to have an N150 in your spare elements bin, you’ll possible nonetheless discover YouTuber Clay Builds’ latest video fairly fascinating. Clay Builds managed to get his palms on one in every of these robots at an public sale. Because it got here with no documentation and the corporate that produced it has been out of enterprise for 1 / 4 of a century, the one approach to make any use of it was to first reverse engineer it. This is usually a very tough process underneath even one of the best circumstances, however with the robotic in a nonfunctional state, it was all of the tougher.

On preliminary inspection, the N150 has a rotating turret on the high that’s lined with ultrasonic sonar modules, which is smart for a robotic designed for exploration. A set of three wheels are on the underside of the robotic, which might be turned for steering and are pushed by a big brushed DC motor. Contained in the anodized aluminum physique of the robotic was a slew of PCBs — every ultrasonic module and wheel had its personal PCB, and a number of other bigger PCBs had been positioned within the heart of the casing.

Clay Builds tears the robotic down and goes deep into the operation, offering info that’s helpful nicely past this specific scenario. This data could possibly be helpful to anybody that’s making an attempt to reverse engineer unknown {hardware}. In the midst of this teardown, Clay Builds discovered the motor management boards and, as a primary step in interacting with the {hardware}, related an Arduino Professional Mini growth board to it. After some experimentation with sending completely different alerts to the inputs of the motor controller, he was capable of drive a spare DC motor that he had readily available.

With that out of the best way, a set of very beefy batteries had been put in within the case to provide the robotic with the 24 volts that it requires for operation. Subsequent, Clay Builds wished to have the ability to interactively drive the robotic, so he wired a PlayStation controller to a Teensy 4.0 (because it helps the three.3 volt logic degree required by the controller) for enter. With a bit extra reverse engineering work, Clay Builds additionally found out drive the motor that controls the steering, then wrote a easy program to translate the requested actions into alerts to ship to the motor controllers.

After reassembling the N150, Clay Builds was capable of efficiently drive the robotic round his home utilizing the PlayStation controller. That was an enormous achievement, however there’s nonetheless plenty of work to do to grasp this robotic, so be sure you keep tuned for future movies.

N150, put together to be reverse engineered! (📷: Clay Builds)

Driving the motors with an Arduino Professional Mini (📷: Clay Builds)

Success! (📷: Clay Builds)

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