James Bruton’s Balance-Bot Anthropomorphizes Bluetooth Speakers

For his latest video, James Bruton was asked to make a robot around the LG XBOOM Go Bluetooth speakers. While this might initially seem like a strange sponsorship deal, the speakers do, in fact, look like a robot head. This is as good a reason as any to mount them to a robot chassis.

Bruton’s design for this project comes in the form of a balance-bot, held up with a pair of 3D-printed wheels. These are turned by brushless DC motors, with timing belts used for gear reduction. A Teensy 3.6 and MPU 6050 IMU allow for PID control, with encoders used to sense how far each wheel has rotated, and an ODrive controller to directly power the motors.

As of now, the robot simply balances more or less in place, but Bruton plans to implement steering and remote control capabilities in a future video. He’ll use an Arduino Mega for the transmitter ‘brain,’ and nRF24L01 transceivers for wireless communication. Motorized arms are also on the agenda, which should be a fun addition to this robo-chassis. What’s perhaps most impressive about the device so far is that it seems to have no problem balancing with a bit of PID tuning, even with the mass of the speaker unit added to the top.

UPDATE: Bruton has uploaded the second video to his balancing boombox bot build.