Have you ever had a project idea sitting in your head that sounds like it’d be awesome but you just never had the motivation to do it? I’ve had this idea of making an First Person View (FPV) robot for LITERALLY years! Last year I finally broke down and bought and wired up the components for FPV, but I never stuck them on a chassis. That could have been the end of it, BUT a couple days ago, I saw that Hackaday was running a new contest and creating a FPV vehicle!!!!!! https://hackaday.io/contest/188273-2022-fpv-contest It’s the perfect kick in the butt to get me to build this bot!
Last night I gathered up most of the electrical parts that I’m going to need:
- FPV transmitter
- FPV headset
- Antenna
- Battery
- ESP32 dev board
- Motor controllers L298N
I also soldered up a power distribution board with 8 outputs which will hopefully be enough. I’m not used to using perf boards which is my excuse for how ugly the soldering ended up being for this. I started out by just trying to put a glob of solder and running that between the tabs, but it wasn’t flowing how I wanted and turning into a giant mess. I ended up grabbing some stranded copper wire and using that to guide the connections. Still a giant mess, but I double and triple checked that there weren’t any shorts and then I covered everything in hot glue to make sure it stayed that way.
Next steps are going to be making a distribution board for the esp32 to sit on and then mounting all of the electronics on a board. I also need to find a power regulator to drop the 11 volts from the battery to 3-6V to run the servos.
Here’s all the parts that I’m using so far. I included an affiliate link for each item, if you decide to click on it, next time you buy something from amazon a small percentage will be sent to me to fund my next robot project! No extra cost to you!