The $200 Do-It-Yourself Robot

At this point in the project, I've achieved the goals I set out for without much budget consideration (though having a wife who monitors the finances always kept price in the back of my mind :) ). As I think about what comes next, I've come to the conclusion that a price target of $200 for the Devalbo Robot will make it more interesting. The goal of this project has always been to drive things along each of the faster, cheaper, and better design axes by cherry-picking and integrating external ideas, components, and software as they become available while keeping things simple enough to build your own. It's just that now, the requirement for cheaper is $200 or less and this will have an effect on faster and better (the original goals are here).

Faster...

How long does it take someone who is not me to follow these instructions and end up with their own robot? The quality of the design, assembly process, and instructions all play a part in this. In theory, the more one pays, the easier these steps should be. Keeping things user-friendly while affordable has a big impact on component selection.

Better...

...the most subjective principle. I'm valuing steps simple enough for you to build copies of the Devalbo Robot without requiring a lot of your time. I'm placing emphasis on supporting substitution as you see fit - like building your own computer. The path of least resistance is to use the vanilla components, but you could also customize parts to maximize performance, or emphasis can be placed on using budget-friendlier parts. So for now, focusing on being the best value in a class of similarly capable robots is "better". Here are some other robots I consider to be in the same class as the Devalbo Robot:
* Brookstone Rover
* Romo

Cheaper...

This is the most interesting challenge. Having this design constraint influences the faster and better parameters - the "betterness" of a robot will be influenced by how long it takes me to do a step vs. paying for someone else to have already done that step. Based on what I've done so far, $200 for parts (excepting batteries and power components) for an indoor, "open-source", extensible platform will be interesting and achievable without being unfeasible.

The Grand Total

Here's the parts list for the current configuration. Let's see what the tally is...