The PCB
What is it for? The main brain of Babot is a Raspberry Pi however it can’t do everything. The custom made PCB is extremely important for three main reasons that are summarized below. The power supply The first use of this PCB is to power the Raspberry Pi. Due to its position in the base of Babot it is easierread more
How does BABOT work?
Intro Babot is composed of four main organs : a Raspberry Pi 4, a camera, a custom PCB and three servo motors. All of those elements have to work together, each organ has a very specific role and has to do its work at the very right time. The responsiveness of Babot is defined by the computing power of theread more
Evolution of BABOT prototypes
The prototypes that followed the first one had the intention of connecting the pole that holds the camera to the main base of Babot. In fact, in the first iteration the pole was completely independent which made it very unstable. It had to be on a metallic surface because it was magnets in its base that prevented it from falling.read more
Modification of the camera’s position
The problem In the first prototypes, the camera was placed at the top of a pole independent from the base of Babot. This location allowed easy recognition of the ball’s position. The camera looked down and the ball appeared to the camera on the white background of the plate. This made the detection of the color of the ball veryread more
How BABOT was born?
The very beginning Back when I was 17 years old, I had to do a high school project that could be about anything. Since I loved robotics and flying things, I first considered building several drones that could fly together to make choreographies. A bit like the illuminated drones that can replace fireworks by making drawings in the sky. Unfortunately,read more
Running BABOT with a Raspberry Pi
One of the priorities to improve the first prototype was to get rid of the need to connect Babot to a computer to make it work. Since the position of the ball is detected by a camera, it requires something powerful enough to do computer vision. Using a Raspberry Pi was the perfect solution, it’s relatively simple to use andread more