Originally Posted by ericgibbs

Never made a balancing robot, but my gut reaction would be, if the the robot got more than +/-37.5 deg off balance from its COG, would it be able to recover..??

Originally Posted by futz

With these motors (full rotation servos - no electronics; just motors) and the heavy weight of my bot, not a chance. Other robots I've seen can recover or stand up from prone. Botka, for instance:

http://revver.com/video/443032/botka...tanding-robot/

Big grippy wheels and powerful motors combined with good controls can do amazing things.

Why I'm asking about gyros is because I don't understand what they mean by degrees per second. Does that mean how sensitive the gyro is? In that case, how sensitive do I want it to be?

Originally Posted by ericgibbs

From my experience with gyro's degrees/sec means the rate of change of signal output with respect to time.

Originally Posted by ericgibbs

I used to have a mechano set as a child, great fun and educational.

Originally Posted by Papabravo

The degrees per second refers to the angular velocity of the rotor. The faster it spins the more angular momentum it has and the greater will be the restoring force when the spin axis is displaced. See the following page

http://www.gyroscopes.org/math.asp

Originally Posted by Papabravo

So we're not talking a mechanical device that generates forces when it is displaced? What's the point of calling it a gyroscope?

Originally Posted by Papabravo

So we're not talking a mechanical device that generates forces when it is displaced? What's the point of calling it a gyroscope? Sounds like a serious truth in advertising issue. This is like 1984

1. War is Peace
2. Love is Hate
3. Truth is Beauty

Originally Posted by 3v0

Wikipedia says "A gyroscope is a device for measuring or maintaining orientation," but then it goes on to talk about angular moment. Maybe we should say the electronic units are gyroscope replacements.

Originally Posted by From another site

The next generation of gyro is the piezoelectric gyro.
Here, there are no spinning bits, only a rapidly vibrating crystal. This crystal wobbles along a particular axis, and as I understand it, turning the crystal will cause disturbances in this wobble which cause a small electric current. This current can be measured and used to adjust your servo position. Piezoelectric systems are very temperature sensitive since temperature affects some internal resistances. This is why they start to drift as the temperature changes. Most piezo gyros now have a temperature compensation circuit to avoid this.

The most modern kind of gyro is the MEMS gyro. MEMS = Micro Electric-Mechanical System. MEMS are molecule sized machines that are fabricated on top of a piece of silicon, along with the electronics to interface to them. I don't know how MEMS gyros work specifically, but they do some sort of differencing on some sort of moving bits

Originally Posted by Sceadwian

Why is a heli gyro too difficult to interface? They're designed to interface directly to a tail rotor control servo. 1.5ms center (no rotation) positive and negative rotation around it's axis will give you a proportionatly higher/lower pulse width based on the rotation change. For ballance rate of change direction isn't too much of an issue, it's update and responce rate for the correction and programming the control loop that are the difficult part.