The innocent little wall-follower mouse...
It's under $20 USD if you shop around a little... I measured the motors, for cheapo's, they are robust, low current and I can't wait to Zap this lil' mouse
How the original wall follower mouse gets around. I have big plans to change all that!!!
Skin and gut the mouse :-) OK, remove the tail which locks the cover, lift off and strip the part (lying along the top)...
Your mouse is just a skeleton at this point... Here's the bummer, the little bolts with the kit-form mouse pull out and get messed up... So be very careful about over tightening these guys....
I make a little bracket by bending a long electrical tab: the material is E-Z to work with, you can bend it with pliers... Mount one end Under the motor bracket on one side... Be careful when you tighten - don't overtighten the screws, they will become plastic coated "plugs" if you over turn 'em... They are like faulty drill-bits to the plastic base.
See if the "proposed" layout fits with the body parts... Hey, Yeh, it does!
Checking clearances - lookin' good for proposed layout....
Now an object comes into view, the reflected IR from the IR emitter triggers the IR Detector and the picAxe turns on the red LED...
No reflections from the IR LED, so there is no object close enough to trigger the detector... The picAXE chip turns the red LED off...
Here's the diagram of the MouseBot "nose." This nose is really more like eyes, but that seems inappropriate for a mouse... So the nose is really an IR object detector created from a picAxe M8 chip...
Temporarily tape the board in place so you can cover the body and make marks where the eyes will go...
Carefully guesstimating where the eyes need to come out of the plastic head... Remember from the experiment, the IR LEDs must supply the IR "on the outside" of the plastic Mouse Body...
Now we have two spots to drill the Mouse Body for the IR LEDs which should look like Mouse Eyes...
Drill the holes and line up the "eyes", for now the "nose" will stay where it's at... We will reserve the right to move it around a little for the sake of the mouse...
Once the object detector was completed, I temporarily mounted it on an insulated base (I used a pc board) this allowed me to do one last in-place test - See Video
MouseBot's Electronic Motor Drive
MouseBot is complete and ready for testing...
Closeup of the modified wall follower mouse... Now it has an IR sniffer to keep it away from walls n obstacles...
Simple Motor Drive - Only use this for testing... The 3904's get hot and make the head soft and melty...
Now we've got it! The power transistors are mounted right at the motor itself. Now we have enough power to make our mousebot go like crazy...
