Well, you just bought your first robot from EBay! Congratulations! You paid .99 for it, a real collectable called the Radio Shack Talking Robie. You may have bought it becasue you needed a cheap platform for testing your high tech ideas!

Of course, you already own all of the Wow Wee robots, right? So, you need a platform to test some of your more radical ideas, until of course, Wow Wee releases a robot with those features already in it! Or, you're starting out on your robotic journey, and you would like to learn something about these little plastic creations.

I was in the same place. I have all of the usual suspects: Robosapiens , Roboquad, RS Media, etc, and am now looking at a reasonable platform to test vision and Internet connectivity without having to perform many surgeries upon the fragile plastic housings of my beautiful collection of WowWee bots.

Starting Out

First things first - do you have a "Problem statement" yet? The first thing to do is to write down what you want to accomplish. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Why? Because robots are complex works of technology and they can be very difficult to keep up with your dreams and ambitions! Robots are comprised of software, hardware, mechanical bits, and a lot of mental sweat. What we will do is start simple, and then move forward with more features.

So, did you write down what you want to do yet?

Now, that wasn't so bad. Let's "pare" it down. Let's get to something simple that we can do with this bot. For example, we know we want to move forward and backwards somewhat autonomously. We know that we want this robot to be somewhat aesthetically pleasing. We know we want to have remote control with expandability (more features later). We also know that we want to integrate these mods into our Robo friends. Write all these requirements down in your lab notebook. What? No lab notebook? Time for a trip to Wal-Mart. Get a notebook of your choice, get some plastic Krylon paint in a color you like, and stop at the hardware aisle and buy an assortment of 4-40 and 6-32 screws and nuts. The notebook will allow you to keep all of your precious design notes in one place (use non virtual cut and paste - scissors and tape), the paint is to change the colors of the plastic from gray to whatever you like, and the nuts and bolts, well, you'll see that you will use quite a few of them as any robot project rolls on!

This will be a multipart project. I call it "CamBot". By the way, make sure you come up with a catchy name for your project. It helps! That way, when everything is going wrong, you have to have a name you can remember when you yell a variety of expletives at it. I will tend to keep things at a beginners level, so that everyone can see what is going on. My intent is to just present the ideas, and the reader can throw his own spin on that. Basically, these concepts can be used on any robot, and will be applicable to many different projects.

My high level "goal" or problem statement for this project :

Mobile robot with real time video transmission, autonomous movements. CAMera roBOT.

Sounds simple, right? However, you will soon see that these few words break down into hundreds of small requirements. We will work through this as we move forward. It is too easy to stray from our goal, so print it out and post it on your workbench or work area.

The Gallery has the initial pictures of the teardown. Go ahead and tear the little guy apart, but make sure you make sketches, take digital pictures, or have a great memory of how the little fella came apart. That way, when you reuse some of the bits that make up the robot, you have a notion of how it came apart. Also, when you post to this thread, you will have the pictures to show everyone here what you did, and why it worked (or did not work - sometimes more important).

A robot hint: If the robot you bought is dirty and needs a lot of cleaning, put the parts in the top shelf of the dishwasher. I wash all the parts, gets all the oil, dirt, silicone, and allows easier painting. Watch out for small parts, however. Dishwashers do not like hardware and wiring getting into the agitators! Once dry, I found a product called 303 (the boat and Jeep owners use this) that does an excellent job of taking out fine scratches and protects the plastic parts from the evil UV. Important : Make sure you paint BEFORE applying 303, or your paint will never stick.

Part 2 will cover drive modifications and wheels. We have to start somewhere!

Part 3 will cover arm modifications so that the camera has a tilt control. We’ll talk about camera options.

Part 4 will cover the microcontrollers and the hardware.

And if we are still here, Part 5 on will cover the software.

All these ideas should migrate into the Robosapiens or Roboquad without too many changes.

Have fun!