Jacques Bitoniau built a custom control system for his quadcopter that replaces a conventional RC transmitter/receiver and features the ability to switch between two different operators for training purposes. In his system, the operator moves a joystick and a WiFi-equipped PC sends commands to a Raspberry Pi, which communicates with one of our Maestros to produce signals for a flight controller.

Jacques also wrote a C++ library for Windows, Linux, and Mac to control the Maestro using its serial interface. (You can now find this as a Recommended Link on our Maestro product pages.)

You can read more about Jacques’s control system in his forum post.

Featured link: http://forum.pololu.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7351

This bipedal robot is controlled by an Android smartphone through a game pad, voice commands, or sensor gloves. It uses a custom Android API, which the creators plan to make open source, and two Maestro 24-channel servo controllers connected to the smart phone via USB. One Maestro is used to read 12 digital and 12 analog inputs, and the other is used to control 24 servos.

This robot was designed and made by Seeberger Robotics & Design, a startup company based in Switzerland. You can see more of their designs on their website.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG_S4LsHqUA

In this video, Amjad Al-Ahdal demonstrates his wirelessly-controlled robot with multiple modes that he programmed in C. The robot contains a PIC18F2455 microcontroller, an nRF24L01+ transceiver, a SN754410 motor driver IC, a Pololu wheel and encoder set, and two 100:1 Micro Metal Gearmotors. Its controller has a homemade keypad, another transceiver, a 9DOF sensor, and a serial 16×2 LCD screen.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1oRE5TTVFU

The Robot Quartet is an art installation by Andres Wanner that features four marker-equipped 3pi robots working together to create drawings. The robots receive identical commands and draw repetitive patterns on the same surface.

You can see more pictures of the completed artworks on Andres’s website.

Featured link: http://www.pixelstorm.ch/pro_robotquartet.php

The node-pololumaestro project is a module for the Node.js platform that allows you to control a Maestro USB Servo Controller over its serial interface from a Node.js program. This module provides functions like maestro.setTarget(0, 1500) and internally takes care of assembling the bytes of the serial command for you. The module was written by Owen McAree and was recently expanded by achingbrain. We always like to see our customers helping each other through projects like this!

Featured link: https://npmjs.org/package/pololu-maestro

In this video, Jerry Guttman shows off his Pololu m3pi Robot combined with the SpeakJet Phraselator Speech Development System. The SpeakJet chip was developed by Magnevation and allows for speech synthesis and robot sound effects.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYWQB12Ibsw

In this video, Brian Patton demonstrates how to program an animatronic robot using a Maestro Servo Controller. He covers basic configuration using the Maestro Control Center and shows how to sync voice with servo motion using software from his company Robodyssey.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yop9Zk2HJMU

Just getting started with electronics? Take a look at this video to get some tips on keeping your wiring neat and clean using our pre-crimped wires and crimp connector housings.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEHlwq3CHk4

In this video, Derek Molloy shows you how to make custom cables using our pre-crimped wires and crimp connector housings and does a great job of showing how to use our crimp tool properly.

Featured link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkbOJSvhCgU

Customer Mike Kohn recently wrote to us about two of his projects that use Pololu parts:

This paper disk is marked with black and white patterns spread across four distinct rings and can store a total of 16 bytes of data. Mike decodes the data with one of our QTR-1RC reflectance sensors. Read more about “PAPER-ROM”…

This balsa wood airplane uses an ATtiny85 to interpret signals from a Syma S107 helicopter remote controller, and it uses our 5:1 micro metal gearmotor HP to spin its propeller. Read more about this airplane project…

Mike has documented many of his other software and electronics projects on his web site.