Tote Zero

Affordable quadruped robot powered by a Pi Zero

The original Tote used an Arduino Pro Mini clone for its brains, as this was the most affordable option available at the time, and reasonably easy to use and program. But now that there is a $5 single-board computer available, why not use it instead?

The advantages, as I see them, are three-fold:

• using Python for programming, which makes it much easier to both write code and test stuff in the interactive console,

• possibly integrating this with ROS, OpenCV and other awesome tools,

• much more computing power, which means that more interesting things can happen.

Logs

• 2016-11-06 - Robot Fusion

• 2016-02-11 - Everything in One?

• 2016-02-07 - Face

• 2016-02-07 - Camera

• 2016-01-27 - First Walk

• 2016-01-26 - One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

• 2016-01-25 - Single-port USB Hub

• 2016-01-07 - Servo Blaster

• 2016-01-07 - Fixed Board

• 2016-01-05 - Off By One Servo Plug

Links

• Code Repository

Components

Component	Count	Notes
Raspberry Pi Zero	1	A+ works too
SG90 Microservo	12	Or any other model of a small, 9g microservo
Custom Printed Circuit Board	1	https://bitbucket.org/thesheep/tote0/downloads/tote0.zip
XM1584-based Switching Voltage Regulator Module	1
2S 300mAh LiPo Battery	1	Or any other 2S LiPo
Pin Headers	2	One double-row angled male, and one female
USB Camera Module	1	Here I used a camera from Asus F5N, other would work too

Instructions

For mechanical assembly, follow the instructions for Tote at http://tote.readthedocs.org

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The code repository at https://bitbucket.org/thesheep/tote0/src contains all the files needed – copy them to the pi

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Get ServoBlaster from https://github.com/richardghirst/PiBits/tree/master/ServoBlaster and compile it and install

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Copy the ‘servoblaster’ startup script from the code repository to /etc/init.d and make it start at startup

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Run the run.py program

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PROFIT!!!