Update TL;DR: Motors arrive tomorrow (controllers, batteries, wheels, etc. all long since arrived), hoping to begin system testing/integration come March. Planning to build 2 (kinda) “Assistant Platforms”, testing both expensive and cheap design variants.
Just under half the design’s sensors selected— I’m designing their control/driving/muxing boards as needed (just basic stuff, I’ll post photos once all the parts arrive and I start breadboarding). Remaining electronics will trickle in gradually, as I’ll be testing/evaluating them before committing.
BoM appears to be on schedule “ish” (for end of Feb.) — stock/structural parts might be delayed.
Budget: ~$6k / $10k spent (2 sets of parts; high-end and cheap); future purchases will be limited to $2k/month
As mentioned in the TL;DR, I’m purchasing 2 sets of parts, one for my stupidly-over-engineered prototype (PR1-alpha) and a cheaper one (~$2k?) with less power and no bilateral redundancy (the PR1-beta). Estimating the PR1-b’s exact build cost could be a bit tricky (it was a last-minute decision in view of coming in under budget), so don’t expect a hard cost number until I hit the design retrospective phase.
Also, busy as I am, I can’t promise I’ll build a complete PR1-b, but I’ll try to build/prove out the assemblies that differ (brackets, suspensions, gearing, maybe AGM battery “capacitor bank” substitute?) as time permits.
- Ordered all motors; I’ve purchased both my 5HP fancy-pants motors and cheaper ($70) e-bike motors with a similar footprint. If time permits, I’d like to test out the latter as well (save you poor souls from having to design your own mounting brackets lol)
- One more expensive motor ($250) will remain (the Bridge’s “leg” motor), as even the PR1-b requires 70-80 N*m to “stand up”. Anons might be able to substitute that with a ~$100 linear actuator if they don’t care about “standing” speed? (speculation)
- Electronics for evaluation/testing (only listing the more significant ones, stuff like limit switches, linear encoders, etc. elided)
- Intel RealSense Depth camera (only 1 for now; for eval)
- RPLider S3 (seems very vulnerable to dY movement while active, might not be as useful as I’d hoped— more eval needed)
- Matek 3901-LOX (flow + lidar) for drive wheels (first board arrived cracked, waiting for a replacement)
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