OTTO-Jockey

Introduction

I have been deeply involved in building small mobile robots for the past few years, mainly for combat robotics. I came across the OTTO robot thanks to a workshop in my university and subsequent research for a project at my workplace. I am immensely fascinated by the community builds that the OTTO Robots have in general. Thanks to my goals for my work project and my desire to eventually build my own OTTO, I came up with the idea to add in some flavor of Minecraft to the OTTO design catalog and also provide an additional possible feature to up the fun factor! Say hello to - OTTO Jockey!

Design

The idea of this remix of the base design of the HP OTTO mobile robot is to redesign the top cover of the robot, adding a different character to it by making it look like a Chicken jockey from Minecraft. The new top cover looks like the top part of a Minecraft chicken with the head in the front and wings on the sides. There is also a rider on the back half, with backpack-like space on its back to carry the lipo for the ESP32 based camera system that adds the FPV feature. The head slots onto the body and has a slot for holding the ESP32 board on the back of the head and a small slot on the front of the head(at the forehead) to hold a small OV3660 camera.

The electronics is quite simple for this proof of concept FPV-like feature. The ESP32 of my choice was the DFRobot's Firebeetle 2 ESP32S3, that has a camera and a lipo connector as well. A compatible Lipo is needed to be plugged in before the robot is ready to be run. The Firebeetle 2 comes with the OV3660 camera, that has decent resolution.

The overall idea is to replace your HP OTTO's top cover with this new cover, add this head or a modified version of your liking to it and place the simple electronics in the slots on the rider. Then you can power on the OTTO, have the FPV system's ESP32 powered-on, then open a browser and open the camera webserver intended to run to provide a basic FPV experience to the users, while they have fun driving their OTTO around.

Mechanical

In terms of the physical aspects, the main task is to 3D print the 2 pieces. The slot in the back of the head should be fine even if you chose a different camera-enabled ESP32. But do double-check and adjust the slot. The camera slot can also be adjusted. But for the most part, the parts should be ready to print. Due to lack of access to a 3D printer in time, I could not test the print out. I also don't have an OTTO kit that I could test as well. I plan to account for this in future updates.

For printing the parts, all you need are
1. An FDM 3D printer
2. White PLA
3. Green/Blue/any color of choice PLA

There is no need for screws for this piece and the Slicer settings can be kept super basic as this in not demanding print from my experience. If your slicer software allows(which most do these days) you could adjust the colors on the body of the rider and also the head.

Please take the STL files into your slicer, check them and print them as is.

To assemble, take the cleaned printed parts, and replace you HP OTTO's top cover with this piece. Then attach the head facing forward. Then take you programmed and assembled electronics circuit and carefully place the Lipo in the backpack slot, the ESP32 in the head slot and the camera can be glued to the forehead slot.

Electronics

The electronics circuit include of 3 components
1. A camera-enabled ESP32 (I chose the DFRobot Firebeetle 2 ESP32S3)
2. Compatible 2S Lipo battery
3. OV3660 camera module that attaches to the camera slot that takes in a ribbon cable

The ESP32 needs to be programmed with the CameraWebServer example code after you have setup your Arduino IDE with the ESP32 board libraries. Follow this guide  to setup your environment for the FireBeetle 2. When it comes to programming the ESP32, you do need to install the DFRobot_AXP313A library as explained in the guide. After that however, I will suggest to just flash the existing CameraWebServer example in the Examples in your Arduino IDE. Before flashing though, make sure your WIFI ssid and password are put in correctly and in the boarddata.h file, you have uncommented the define line for the Firebeetle 2 and commented the other board's define line(most likely the ESP-EYE, another good ESP option to consider). After flashing the CameraWebServer example, obtain the IP Address and open it in your device, that is in the ESP32's WLAN, through a browser. Then you can see the camera feed, which we can use to see the robot's front space once the ESP and its circuit is installed on the OTTO-Jockey's rider.

Comments and Future Ideas

This build was a proof of concept for a possible FPV system that can be added on the existing feature rich HP OTTO design. I am confident that an FPV feature will definitely boost the wow factor and increase the ways of enjoying the OTTO.

For future work, I want to
1. More varied and betters design options for the rider
2. ESP32 camera integrated into the HP OTTO's base ESP32 board
3. Option to add more processing options like a PiZeroW
4. If a PiZeroW like processor can be added, more software to make the OTTO into a desktop companion robot can be explored!