Here’s a first example of the JeeBot standing upright:

When held upright on startup, it actually stands on it’s own two wheels very calmly, compensating immediately for slight imbalances for a couple of seconds. But beyond a minor error, it fails to regain its balance – so my hands are right outside the picture, ready to catch it :)

Have added a Memsic 2125 accelerometer to provide a sense of what’s up. It’s connected to port 1, with the X and Y axes each producing pulses at around 100 Hz.  The gyro kicks in when it’s falling either way. Having both near the center of gravity helps, as the counter force of the servo won’t disturb the accelerometer as much.

Here’s the main code. It has a crude low-pass filter and PID control loop:

The parameters were set using (much) trial and (much) error. I’ll clearly need to learn more about PID control to make this thing properly self-balancing. The loop runs 49 times per second on average, which also happens to be the servo pulse rate – maybe there’s some accidental interaction with the SoftwareServo library.

But still, a lot better than I had expected after one day!