Chibots

Bill Collis wrote this book especially for his students. He is a teacher at Mount Roskill Grammar School in Auckland (New Zealand) . This is an excellent guide to AVR Microcontrollers and programming with Bascom. You can visit his site at http://www.techideas.co.nz/

http://www.wrighthobbies.net/download/bascom-avr-theory.pdf

Index Photo: 

Matador has a Mark III chassis and is powered by an ATmega48 running custom C code.

His drive train is two GWS S03TXF 2BB servos converted for full rotation from an external H-Bridge.

I stopped by Pumping Station One's Open House tonight to see what it was all about now that they have their space. I found a great group of guys and gals that were friendly and helpful and in to a variety of cool things. TomG and I learned a lot that will help us set up our own Milwaukee Hackerspace/Makerspace. For you folks in Chicago, you may want to stop by and check them out one Tuesday.

Open Area:

 

If the minutes seem a little light this month, the reason is twofold. Reason one- It's hard to run the meeting and take notes at the same time! Reason two- it was a slow month, with the meeting ending around 2:30 instead of our usual custom of being run out of the room at 4:05!

1. Meeting opened at 1:30 by Will
a. Officer present- Will Meitzler (secretary)
2. Began with around-the room introductions
a. 9 attendees including 3 new faces
3. Club business
a. Since the secretary is in the dark about most current business we ran through dues for our new members instead
4. Presentation

modified robonova-1

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This robot is a scaled down version of my RedRobot. It now weighs under 50 lbs to meet the SRS RoboMagellan rules. This robot currently has a NetBurner MOD5270 controller as the main robot controller. It is using JR Kerr PIC-Servo chips to control the motors. It has an Asus eee900 laptop running RoboRealm software for orange cone detection. The current sensors are a gyroscope, accelerometers ( for tilt detection), a Devantech compass, a bumper sensor and a web camera on the Asus laptop.

So today I discovered two things: I have a transistor in backwards on Uno-version-Dos' drive board and I am out of de-soldering braid. :(

Index Photo: 

Minibot is my 1st attempt at making a robot that could be entered in line following and mini sumo contests. My primary goals are just to see if I can do it, and to see what I can learn in the process.

I worked on my sensor board again tonight. I got the sensor portion, as opposed to the led driver portion, working. I had to do a bit more board repair. Apparently, when I swapped the incorrectly routed op-amp outputs and power lines, I damaged a via and disconnected the forward looking opamp from the MCU. I wound up drilling out a couple vias to fix it.