Our Projects

  • Mechatron Tank

    45 pounds of attitude
  • Creepy Crawler

  • Mars Rover - Spirit II

    Our homage to NASA
  • Trekker - Front View

    Trekker

    GPS navigation & 6WD Suspension
  • Terrabot

    Terrabot

    Our rough terrain traveling robot
  • Security Robot

    Security V Robot

    Our roaming, sensing, shooting robot
  • Remote Control Box for our Mechatron Robot

    Retro-Style Remote Control

    We like real switches and knobs!
  • Nautilus

    Aluminum quadrotor w/ HD camera & FPV goggles
  • Black Dragon

    Our carbon fiber quadrotor
  • Black Hornet

    Our miniature carbon fiber quadrotor
  • The Flyer I Quadrotor

    Our first flying robot
  • Kitbot

    A kit we designed for our friends to build
  • Telepresence Robot

    Mobile Video Conferencing
  • I.C. 1-2-3  (Photo Credit: lunamoth)

    Our Smallest Robot

  • Roamer Robot

    RoamerBot

  • OUR FIRST ROBOT:  I.C. 12

    I.C. 12

    Our first robot
  • Lunamoth's Steampunk Necklace

  • Tube Clock Kit

  • Stirling Engine

    Sterling Engine Kit

  • Blinky Belt

    Blinky Belt

    A programmable LED belt

 
































Featured Posts from the Workshop Blog

23 Comments

  1. Mike Maya & Brooke Solomon

    We want to try it as well. How do you suggest we get started?

  2. Hello Mike, Maya & Brooke. I can help you get started.
    Take a look at the Tube Clock http://beatty-robotics.com/?p=151 or perhaps the Blinky Belt http://beatty-robotics.com/?p=285
    Those projects require soldering (which is fun once you get the hang of it), but they are good little kits with excellent instructions, and don’t take any programming (unless you want to change the default light pattern like we did, in which case, that requires programming). The girls love the Tube Clock and the Blinky Belt. These aren’t robots, but they are good electronic projects to start with. However, these kits will require concentrated effort and attention to detail with Dad leading the way.

  3. Dan: I like your in-process and completed pics. That clock is so neat, but it’s hard to photograph and do it justice. Thanks for the comment.

  4. Wow my nieces are famous!!!! How cool, just always remember your favorite Aunt….

  5. You girls are the luckiest kids ever!! I wish I could get my parents to do this kind of thing with me!! you guys rock.

  6. BryceJ from Jawja

    Hi Uncle Robert and Beatty girls!

    I totally enjoyed helping to build Mechatron when I was visiting earlier this year. Please keep me posted on your latest and greatest project(s). I am trying to get my folks to visit again soon so I can do more wiring and soldering…

  7. Hello BryceJ from jawja. Be sure to Subscribe using the link at the top of the screen. This way, when we add new posts you’ll be notified. We are working on a new robot that you’re going to love to drive even more than you loved driving Trekker! :)

  8. thats some cool stuff your doing

    if you don’t mind me asking, do you have blue prints or other info on how to make some of this stuff

  9. Nice work!–saw your item in Make:

    Love the rocker bogie suspension…

    • Posted on The ancient Greek psoholiphers and the writers of the Old Testament stressed that there is a higher law than human law. In the first century B.C., the Roman philosopher Cicero insisted that this higher natural law is universal and can be discovered through human reasoning. (It is God’s law, which he reveals to all people through their reasoning. It is not learned. It is divinely given) This led to the idea that government power has limits, and that people and governments everywhere are bound by natural law.

  10. sir i have 4 pusher propellor.can u suggest me how can i make two of them as puller prop as u said in ur project that u have tilt the motor to 8 degree???????/

    • If you have a normal sized quad (bigger than 10″ or 12″ across), I wouldn’t use this method. However, if you have a tiny quad and you need to use this method, then you tilt two of the motors (such as the left and right motors) 8 degrees off vertical in opposite directions. This is a primitive method and doesn’t work great, but it sort of works. Since then, I’ve switched to using two Puller Propllers and two Pusher propellers on all the quads, even the tiny quad.

  11. thankzzzzzzzzzzzz

  12. Jason Hamilton

    Robert,

    Nice pics. Thanks for the allowing me to take a peek.

  13. Me and my father have been inspired by you guys :-)
    curently we are woking on a rather LARGE robotic car we want to use an rc arm, got any suggestions? much apriciatted. :{)

  14. the truck was actually a Huge rc car we just hacked it striped it and replaced the components it’s about 1″ tall by 2 1\2″ long.
    curently it is rc we want to add an aurdino to it
    it does have an FPV cam we instaled, however it’s only about 1\2 inch tall so it has to be in line of sight with the reciver.
    I also was wondering if you use a TURNIGY 9X TRANSMITTER for black Dragon?

    • We use a Futaba RC transmitter for all the quadrotors. For the land-based robots, we use an arduino + xbee remote controller that we built ourselves, including an ASCII-based command protocol that we developed ourselves.

  15. Hi, love the Mechatron Tank!

    How does the BB feed work to the Airsoft gun?

    regards

    • Thanks, Geoff. I bought a high capacity electric airsoft magazine, hacked it to pieces, replaced the servo and some of its internal mechanism, and installed it into the base of the robot. Then I ran a long spring (from McMaster-Carr) (with an I.D. a little larger than the 6mm BBs) up to an airsoft aftermarket hop up unit, which in turn feeds the bb into the gun. The spring is inside the flexible metal tubing, which you can see attached to the underside of the gun in the pictures. The other flexible metal tubing is packed with wires that go to the sensor head. The feed machoism I’ve described here was one of the more difficult challenges of the robot.

  16. Robert – thanks for your detailed reply.

    I need to do something similar for a airsoft senty I’m building (as shown here http://www.paintballsentry.com/).

    Sounds like there was little left of the original hicap magazine – would you bother with this if you had to do one again, or would you build your own from scratch. I’m thinking a sprocket gear might be the right shape to rotate the bbs.

    regards
    Geoff~

    • Nice work on your project, Geoff. Regarding your question: I needed to hack into an existing magazine to understand their function and mechanics, so in that regard it was totally necessary. I was not experienced with the internals of Airsoft equipment when I began. I did like being able to use the existing unit. If I had it to do over again, I would probably do something similar again, although crafting it from scratch would work, too. A sprocket gear does indeed work for rotating the BBs.

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