Skip to content

Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio

⠀

Menu
  • Scholars Studio Blog
    • Digital Methods
      • coding
      • critical making
      • data visualization
      • digital pedagogy
      • immersive technology (AR/VR)
      • mapping
      • textual analysis
      • web scraping
    • Disciplinary Fields
      • Anthropology
      • Archaeology
      • Architecture
      • Art History
      • Business
      • Computer Science
      • Critical Digital Studies
      • Cultural Studies
      • Dance
      • Economics
      • Education
      • Environmental Studies
      • Film Studies
      • Gaming Studies
      • Geography
      • History
      • Information Science
      • Linguistics
      • Literary Studies
      • Marketing
      • Media and Communication Studies
      • Music Studies
      • Political Science
      • Psychology
      • Public Health
      • Sculpture
      • Sociology
      • Urban Studies
      • Visual Art
  • Current Staff
  • Current Fellows
    • Faculty Fellowships
    • Graduate Extern Program
  • About
  • Newsletter
Menu

Disco, The Robot Dog

Posted on September 15, 2016January 14, 2019 by Emily Logan

By Emily Logan

Introducing DiscoI would like everyone to meet Disco, the newest member of the Digital Scholarship Center community! No cats allowed…

Disco is an Arduino Mega 2560 powered robot dog. complete with 12 servo motors – 3 per leg, 2 Lithium Ion batteries, 2 circuit boards and a lot of jumper cables. This endearing bionic dog has just learned how to walk, but that is just the beginning of what this pup will be able to do. Disco is currently being operated on to get a body upgrade complete with a wagging tail, an on/off switch, a voice control system that will bark at students, an ultrasonic sensor SRF04 that detects the distance between Disco and other objects and a fully enclosed body. Here is a little bit of how Disco was born.

Several months ago, @letsshall (Liz Rodrigues) conceived of the idea to have a robotic dog greet people as they walked into the DSC and @ECornuet thought “Hey! lets collaborate!”

We did a little googling and found that there are many versions of robot dogs all across the internet, but we decided on using directions from a project book called Arduino By Example by Adith Jagadish Boloor. I have since innovated and deviated slightly from the project book. All of the code is open source and accessed through Packt Publidhing if you have a Temple University account.

Here are Disco’s “body parts”:

  • 1x Arduino MEGA 2560 – $45
  • 12 x 9g Micro servos (2+ extra servos recommended) – We will need 8 more of these total cost – $5.95 x 8 = $47.60
  • 20x Male-to-female connecting wires – $1.95
  • 1x 7.4V (2 Cell) 2200 mAh (or above) LiPo battery –$8.93
  • 1x 3A UBEC (Universal Battery Elimination Circuit) –$5.59
  • 1x XT60 male connectors – $4.99
  • 1x 7.4V 500 mAh LiPo battery –$8.42
  • 1x 2.1m x 5.5mm connector for battery – $3.88
  • 1x Female JST connector -$9.98
  • 1x LiPo battery charger $33.99 
  • 3x Insulating tape (different colors) $5.12
  • 1x USB cable A to B (also known as the printer cable)
  • 1x Breadboard
  • 40x Male-to-male connecting wires
  • 20x Ice cream/popsicle sticks
  • 1x Wood glue
  • 1x Ruler/measuring tape
  • 1x Regular-type screwdriver
  • 1x Multimeter
  • 1x Pack of rubber bands
  • 1x Pack/roll of double-sided tape
  • 1x PC with a microphone
  • 1x Proto board
  • 40x Male headers
  • 1x Soldering kit
  • 1x Thumb pin or needle
  • 1x Pack of paper clips
  • 1x Pliers
  • 1x Wire cutter
  • 1x Cutting blade

Dog Walk1

To print out Disco’s body upgrade, I used a free website called MakeCase where you can type in the dimensions and the thickness of your material, and then it gives you free svg files that you can laser cut very easily. The box fits perfectly together and only took 5 minutes to print. However, the material I used for Disco’s body (1/4in Birch Plywood) was too heavy, so I will need to find a lighter material to house the circuits (most likely cardboard).

Screen Shot 2016-08-04 at 2.38.23 PM

IMG_1318 2

The inspiration for Disco’s face came from my Goldendoodle, Misty.

IMG_1317
IMG_1217 (1)

 

 

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent Posts

  • Web Scraping Wikipedia to Analyze XBOX Game Development Companies by Nationality January 4, 2023
  • Critical Elements for Making Games December 22, 2022
  • Cities as Havens for Bees: Using Remote Sensing to Visualize Urban Bee Habitat December 21, 2022

Tags

3D modeling 3D printing 360 video arduino augmented reality authorship attribution coding corpus building critical making Cultural Heritage data cleaning data visualization digital art history Digital Preservation digital reconstruction digital scholarship film editing games GIS linked open data machine learning makerspace mapping network analysis oculus rift omeka OpenRefine Photogrammetry physical computing Python QGIS R SketchUp stylometry text analysis text mining textual analysis top news twitter video analysis virtual reality visual analysis voyant web scraping YouTube

Archives

©2023 Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio | Design: Newspaperly WordPress Theme