I’ve started hacking away on a prototype program to have the robot drive around the room and investigate the objects it finds with the ultrasound sensor. Part of that was to take a picture, so I needed to get a camera. Raspberry Pi makes a nice add on camera which just comes with a ribbon cable and the camera card. You can just let the ribbon cable anchor the camera to the upper deck of the GoPiGo robot, but it seemed to be too low so that you’d always take pictures of the ultrasound sensor and also not well anchored so when the robot drove around it would flop back and forth. So I needed to fabricate a bracket.
I decided to make it in two parts, a lower right angle made out of .032” aluminum and an upper mounting plate made of the same 1/8” acrylic sheet that the rest of the body parts are made of. I made the cuts in both the acrylic and the aluminum using my Dremel tool and a cutting disk. It worked pretty well just needing to take my time and not heat the acrylic up too much. The only downside is that there isn’t a way to use a guide ( or shall I say I haven’t figured that out yet ) so the cut edges are a bit erratic. The resulting bracket is charmingly imperfect, but completely functional. I secured it to the upper deck with 8x3mm screws, nuts and a compression washer, the mounting plate is attached to the aluminum angle in a similar manner. I almost had an issue because unlike everything else on the GoPiGo the camera board has 2mm holes. Fortunately I had a couple of 8x2mm screws and nuts and I was able to use them to attach the board to the mounting plate. Because of the inaccuracies of my fabrication I had resigned myself to crooked pictures, but due to a happy accident, my inaccuracies canceled out and the camera ends up quite level.
Now back to debugging my patrol code and adding in the image captures.