Completed! Mini Project – Self Balancing Robot (using Teensy 3.2)

Hey fellas,
Just completed my Mini Project- Self Balancing Robot it was awesome all my friends loved it, at the first go, none of them understood how it worked.  They were like, what does this robot (lying down) do ? Slide on the floor ? And when I turned it on and the robot started balancing and bobbling around like a baby, they were amazed. This reaction was only possible because most them have seen segway in some shape or form, but haven’t seen an unmanned implementation of the concept.

(Project Code & Gerber files available at the bottom)

I also would like to add an important note as I have presented this project as my “college project”, I do think many of you might be here because you are researching for your college project.

I will suggest you all to not do this project as your college project because while you are flexing your “control system muscles” in front of everyone the person examining your project might not find it applicable or useful or practical in some sense, let me tell you why I am saying this, as I mentioned all my friends loved it and so did my project guide but during my exam {which in my case when an external examiner (some one appointed by university who isn’t from our college) comes to grade the project}  the external examiner wasn’t as thrill as others who saw the project. It may be because of many reasons but I think the reason might be due to limitations of it’s application, the only application was Segway, which isn’t much of a socially approved vehicle on its own. Anyway, people in India are not aware of Segways. They were flashed in few movies but most of us don’t know what it is called.

It might be different in your country just give it a second thought. I was aware of this but my project guide supported me and overall I didn’t care I loved the idea and I was going to make it anyway.

And another important note for such kinds of robots always create a wireless connection to your PC or mobile to update the PID value doesn’t matter if you use it for controlling or not just make it for updating the values because you have to do that again and again and again many times till you get the right PID values and you seriously don’t want to connect and disconnect your cables that many times. I did it manually at first then I had to program in a Bluetooth device that talked to my phone which updated the PID values in the code.

Link to the code and project Gerber files

Watch on Youtube

Check out my instructable on how to build this robot (link).

References –

As always Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_pendulum

http://sebastiannilsson.com/en/k/projekt/selfbalancing-robot/

http://www.x-firm.com/?page_id=145

http://www.bajdi.com/