Electropopper

Electropopper's solar cell and wheels were salvaged from an earlier failed experiment involving me not understanding what torque means. I wanted to explore more capabilities of the Bicore chip after my success with Fleet Beacon. I was looking thru some schematics and found the Shokpopper circuit that people regarded as a worthy build.

I had just received two beautiful new 200 RPM gear motors, and wanted to put my torque issues to rest. These would definitely do the job. Normally I would use crazy glue to mount these to the bot, but in case I wanted to repurpose them later, thus I opted for zip ties.

I went a little overboard with the aesthetics on this bot, starting here with the Bicore. I just got some new solid core wire (24 AWG) in various colors and wanted to demo them out. I am using 0.22uF timing caps. I could have gone bigger, but I wanted its behavior to be different from the miller poppers in the robot park, with smaller more rapid steps. I doubled up on the 4700uF caps to give the motor steps a bit more gusto.

I had a lot of fun putting this guy together, mainly because I was happy to turn a failure of a bot into a successful one. The solar panel on this bot puts out 4.3V at 80mA, which is enough to make this bot pop about 4 times a second, almost run continuously in full sunlight. This bot was my best example of good aesthetics. It takes time and patience, but is sure rewarding. Electropopper, along with Scorpio; his brother will be receiving touch sensors soon.