Gyroscopic RC Ball

Ship #1 Changes requested

@Board on Gyroscopic RC Ball · 25 days ago

I made a gyroscopically driven remote control ball!
The idea is that there is a ball with a sort of gyroscope setup in it, with motors controlling the axis of the gyroscope. In the center is a sort of pendulum or weight, that gets spun by the motors to be at an angle changing the center of mass of the ball causing it to roll. One challenge I had to change microcontrollers from an Arduino nano to a esp32 xiao because I had no way to get Bluetooth connection to work on the nano partway through. Another challenge was getting the IOS app that I found to connect to the xiao and have it actually interpret the signals that. I used that app because it was IOS, could connect to Bluetooth low energy (BLE) devices, and it has a nice control board system.
The final issue I ran into (that I was worried about from early on) is that the central ring with all the electronics takes up way to much space because of the size of the motors I have, forcing the central weight/pendulum to be a bit to small, making it very hard to control the direction the ball goes. I explain this more in detail on the README in my GitHub repository.
If someone actually wants to try and make something like this for themselves, the most useful part here is probably the concept and the control code.
I am decently happy with how this turned out, especially with all I learned in using microcontrollers, sawdering, electronics, and more CAD practice. I do want to come back to it in the future and try some ideas I have to make it work better.
Also I’m super happy with how it turned out looking, partly because of the color, and partly because I think the screw holes look cool.
Being a hardware project, the logged time is way less than the actual time spent because there is not a good way to actually log hours for things like research, wiring, assembly, and testing.
🤖⚽

3 devlogs
16h build

Video of Project → See source code →

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@Board on Gyroscopic RC Ball · 25 days ago

1h 59m 57s logged

Finished my first iteration of my remote control ball!
Mostly done by spending a few hours moving everything off a breadboard, double checking to make sure I wasn’t going to short the thing, and researching how to charge the battery safely. (I have to charge it by plugging the battery into the circut board from the rc car I pulled it from as that has the proper charging circuit for it.
I also reworked the joystick control code to have two joysticks to control the two motors separately.
Video of it running here: https://youtu.be/vGXm_efYap4 Sadly the ball is less controllable than I had hoped. The weight in the center is too far from the edge of the sphere because the central ring takes up too much space. This does give me a nice proof of concept for future iterations and on what I can change to make it work better. I also spent like an hour making cleaning up my GitHub page and adding files and images to it.
Pictures of the ball and charging setup are attached.

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@Board on Gyroscopic RC Ball · about 1 month ago

8h 3m 5s logged

Devlog #2
Major progress on my Remote Controll Sphere!
I first printed out the parts that I had mentioned modeling in my previous devlog and they came out quite well!
When testing connection, I realized the old hc-10 Bluetooth module I had did not work, so I researched some alternatives and purchased some Seeed Studio Xiao esp32c6’s as they were cheap and had built in Bluetooth connectivity. After quite a few hours of fiddling and tweaking code (with some help from chat GPT and my friends) I managed to get this IOS app I found called Bluetooth serial connect, which has a great control board system, to send signals to my xiao board and have the board interpret them. I made the onboard LED change brightness to test the pwm for initial testing.
I then sawdered the battery connections to my xiao board and the motor cables and used a breadboard to match everything’s wiring. With this wiring done, I wrote some code and did some debugging to make one of the motors controllable with a joystick on the Bluetooth serial app, and it all worked great (including the battery to my great relief. So now I mostly just have to make real control code for the ball and do final assembly and tweaks.
It’s been a long while since my last devlog, I probably should have done more in the middle to better show hours, but this is what I got now. Also the logged hours is just my coding time, I definitely spent quite a few hours on things like research and wiring/sawdering/assembling
Guitar in the assembled ball prototype for scale!
Yes that shell’s diameter is exactly the max print volume for the A1 mini.

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@Board on Gyroscopic RC Ball · about 2 months ago

5h 32m 22s logged

RC Ball Devlog #1
The idea is to have a ball that internally contains a gyroscope mechanism and two motors in the middle of the ring of the gyroscope to drive the vehicle on two different axis’s, giving it the capability to simply start rolling in any direction without turning.
The two main things I have done so far are
1: Model the basic internals of the Ball and print out the basic prototype for the internals to give me a better view of what I was doing. I like how it turned out except that I got the size slightly wrong on the bearing mounting holes and the mount of the central weight to one of the motors.
2: I tried to get the electronics working with a HC-06 Bluetooth module and nano clone board that I was given a few years ago, but it seems that something is wrong with the Bluetooth module causing it to lose connection immediately upon connecting to a computer. I did get some code for the motors to work though!

It’ll probably be real slow, but if its cool that don’t matter to much!