Work in progress

Firstly, Hello to all my very very very patient readers!

Things are progressing well on the hardware side of things, I have upgraded the power supply and it's associated circuitry, have incorporated an LCD into the robot, and have massively revised the Arduino's program.

Unfortunately, I have hit a bit of a wall as the current revision of the code has a problem, namely the Arduino locks up after running for 5-10 seconds.

Because of this, I have decided to rewrite the serial IO code (where I think the problem is) from scratch. This should be done by the end of next weekend, where I will take another big step forward, and release it under the GPL!

So, more to follow soon, and thank you all for staying with this blog despite my very intermittent updates.

I'm back!

Wow, it has been along time. Since my last post, I have changed both employer and hours, transitioning from part to full-time work. Focussing on and adjusting to both of these took a large chunk of the time that I would usually spend playing with robots.

I am now employed at Nunatak Systems, developing web-applications on the Plone/Zope platform. This is a new direction in my career, and I am eagerly looking forward to expanding and professionalising my software development skills at this fantastic company.

Now that I have a handle on things, I promise more posts will follow, starting with an interesting area that I am exploring with my CMUcam/Stickduino-powered robot. To give you a hint, I am working on a Rodney Brooks-style behavioural approach for connecting the CMUcam to the motor controlling H-Bridges for a very organic and fluid method of obstacle avoidance.

A Milestone! (Comes with free kitten...)

Well, here it is. The robot can now navigate in a basic way using just the CMUcam and an Arduino. The program is based on a very simple concept; the robot asks the camera for the average colour and standard deviations from that colour for the top and bottom halves of the scene in front (the floor). It then compares them 2 times a second, and if they differ by more that a chosen amount, the robot reverses and turns to avoid.

Arduino 12 released!

Grab it here, thanks Make. I'll recompile my latest build in it later today and let you all know of any changes that relevant to the robot.

Circles and lines

Here it is in action, with the pair of shiny new L293D's from Solarbotics. They didn't fit first go, but after a bit of gentle modification of the Rogue Blue's servo casings, it all came together.

The finished result is definitely more sprightly than before!

For those of you with both an Arduino and the desperate need to hook it up to a dual H-Bridge, the code is here.

Details of the CMUcam

Here is a nice close-up of the CMUcam1 board, showing the power and Stickduino connections (click on image for a readable version).

Finally, under its own steam

Finally, the robot moves under its own steam - without umbilicals to a pc!

This is my first CMUcam + Arduino version, the code for which will be uploaded soon. As you can see below, it is a bit of a rush-job, caused by the blowing-up of my proper h-bridge, and its replacement with a single power-transistor (click for big version).


Below you can see two movies of the robot in action, one from on-board.

Step 1 of many

Any guesses as to where this is heading...

A little progress

I am slowly knocking up a neat little proto-board for testing out the arduino, more pics to follow as I have time.

Shopping...

I just bought one of these little beauties, the StickDuino, and its tiny size is awesome. There are no tricks of perspective here, it is almost exactly the same size as my old work-horse SanDisk USB Stick, although a tiny bit wider. Aside from the sub-$20USD price-tag, the best bit is the integrated USB chip + connector, something that made the "package-arrived" to "blinking-LED (hello-world) program running" process about 3 minutes (the time it takes to install the drivers and un-rar the IDE).

My intention is to have this attached to the back of my Robosapien V1, with an IR LED for control, or to the CMUCam for a little cat-tracking robot!