Meet Balanbot. Our goal is to have it ready to play after putting together a simple kit!

Thanks for everyone to make the Balanbot success. You can continue to pre-order it on Maker Studio website. It should be ready by Dec. 15th, 2014. 

We are Makers, we design for Makers!

The self-balancing Robot is an interesting educational toy. Many friends around us were trying to build one, but they encountered many challenges including the lack of the parts that are easy to assemble, suitable electronic circuits, and sample programs. So, we decided to make a self-balancing robot as simple as possible.

Thanks to Arduino team that almost every maker has one Arduino board in hand. Among those Arduino boards, Arduino UNO R3 is the most universal entry-level board. Arduino UNO is open source and there are huge of applications based it. We want to help those who has the similar idea of making a self-balancing robot based on the Arduino UNO.

Her it comes - Balanbot!

The Balanbot is a Arduino Based Self-balancing Robot Kit.

The Balanbot is Open Source and easy to assemble. It uses strong acrylic structures and keeps the robot balanced using its center of gravity. In order to achieve high-performance, we tests various torque-gear motors to ensure the robot will keep balance and move flexibly even if it gets pushed suddenly.

Building the Balanbot will be so much fun for novice and experienced robotics fans!

Typical Control Demonstration

To meet different needs, we implemented several ways to control the Balanbot. We believe the applications of Balanbot are unlimited and up to its users and their favorite devices and platforms.

Hardware Design

The Balanbot includes everything you need to make your own self-balancing robot: two high torque and high speed gear motors, wheels, acrylic structures, 18650 battery holder (batteries are not included), Balance Shield, and Arduino UNO-compatible board.

The Balanbot uses one 5mm and two 3mm thick acrylic boards and other accessories for its main structure. The 5mm board is used to fix the two motors. One of the 3mm boards is used to fix the battery and the other is for an Arduino-compatible board plus the Balance Shield.

The Balanbot is super easy to assemble and play! There are no complicated connections and it is fast to put together. It is suitable for kids and experienced makers as well. Thanks to the powerful Balance shield, it is much easier now to create a balancing robot than it was before.

The Balance Shield uses an MPU6050 which is the world’s first integrated 6-axis motion-tracking device that combines a 3-axis gyroscope and a 3-axis accelerometer. It connects to the Arduino UNO compatible board through the I2C interface. With this sensor, you can get stable angle when the Kalman filter is used.

The Balance Shield also integrated one L298P for driving motors. The L298P is a high voltage (50V), high current (2A) dual channel full-bridge driver. It can drive inductive loads such as relay, DC, and stepping motors.

There are also led indicators, a power switch and a buzzer on the Balance Shield. You can even write your own code to make it play a melody.

A universal serial interface is left for connecting adapters like serial Bluetooth and serial Wi-Fi for communicating with other devices. Four IO pins are left for connecting other sensors or RC receiver for making it more extensible.

We provide beautiful and colorful acrylic structures!

Have fun with the Balanbot!

Software Design

The Balanbot software explores almost all the resources of an Arduino UNO. The Kalman filter is used to combine the data from the gyroscope and the accelerometer together in order to get stable angle information. With optimized PID parameters we obtained after several months of testing, the Balanbot now has strong stability!

The controller accepting control messages comes from UART. It is easy to communicate with the Balanbot using adapters such as Bluetooth, serial Wi-Fi, etc.

The coolest fact is that the controller accepts up to 4 channel ppm signal from an RC receiver. It means that you can control the Balanbot with a  Remote Controller, if you have one at hand.

We created an Android App and a PC software as well. You can control your Balanbot any way you want!

The referral Contest - Win a gift for free

You and anyone else can promote the campaign, in any way (but spam) and the person who raises the highest amount of money based off of referrals will get a prize. If you liked this project on facebook, tweeted it, or plused it on Google, commented on forums or reddit for example, then you are automatically apart of the referral contest. You know that every user on indiegogo has his/her own code ID, you share the project link to others, then it is easy for indiegogo know the influence.

So all you have to do is get online anywhere and share with as many people as possible your link, and then wait. The person who brings the highest amount of funds by his/her referral code will get the stunning prize!

All the information can be checked in the dashboard supplied by indiegogo website. We will show it at last when the contest is done. We will send one gift to the winner, it is our next cool project. And we will let you know all the detail at last. It is going to be FREE, if you win the referral contest, so I suggest you start to like this project on facebook, tweet, share, and post (again, no spam) your link (dedicated to this campaign) everywhere.

Open Source and Tech. Support

We believe in the Open Hardware movement. We benefited a lot from it and we are eager to contribute back. The design of the Balanbot will also be Open to encourage learning and further modifications for any purpose. 

If you have more questions, please feel free to contact us. We will build a forum and a mailing-list and invite people to discuss cool applications for the Balanbot!

How Things are Going

You can see the beta version of Balanbot for now.

Demo version.

We Need Your Help

Meet the Maker Studio team!

Risks & Challenges

There are always some risks and challenges for any hardware project in manufacturing. We have a lot of experience in hardware manufacturing, however. The Balanbot is fully tested and is ready for the batch manufacturing. We hope everything will go smoothly and we will work hard to have the rewards to be shipped in time.

As for the risks from delivery, we have been shipping thousands of packages and established good relationships with many transporters. They will help ensure that the rewards arrive in time and in perfect condition.

Other Ways You Can Help

We are looking for some one who will be intrested in developing iOS app for Balanbot.

You know we can use a Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energe (BLE) module to connect Balanbot with iOS device (iPhone 4S and above). We will share the protocol and Android code to you, and help you understand the communication method we use. Now you need is just coding for iOS and share it to all the fans later. 

What is really important is, we must be open for everyone. Open the hardware and open the software. 

When you have done iOS, then tell us and we will share people where the App is.

We will give one Balanbot with BLE module for free to thank the first  iOS developer!!

Thank you all, have a nice day!