22 Nov 08 The Robot: Independant, moving, talking, and controlled via WiFi

I’ve made some excellent progress over the last week! The Robot is now independant, and it moves freely. I’ve written a simple shell script to take the following characters as control:
a – left
s – stop
d – right
w – forward
x – back
q – hard stop
k – turn anticlockwise
l – turn clockwise

This sends a single byte to the serial port. I am using 2xUSB to TTL converters which show up as

/dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/ttyUSB. Each serial port controls two motors through the sabertooth controller. As we control two motors with only a byte, each motor has a 7 bit resolution from full reverse to full forward. For motor 1, 0 is stop, 1 is full forward, 64 is stop, 127 is full reverse. Motor 2 starts at 128 for full forward, 192 for stop, and 255 as full reverse. Although 7 bits of accuracy, speed changes only seem to occur at roughly 4 intervals, so we technically have about 32 different speeds, 14 forward, 2 stop, 14 reverse. We’re only using 3 speeds though as I can’t see the benefit in programming for any more right now.

The movement now seems to be working well. Smooth, controlled and straight which is something of a miracle

The battery is a 12V/7.2Ah sealed lead acid battery. With USB devices active, the board running and the processor 100% active, as well as peripheral fancy LEDs, digital outputs high, wifi active, etc, it uses 12v/800mA.

With all four motors moving at full speed, it uses 12v/6A. Seeing as the motors will be in action for short periods only, I would expect 6h+ battery life.

I have tested the sensors, and they are all working and reporting data except for the top back one which I’m going to have to investigate. Here are some more pictures:

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Tags: digital output, espeak, Linux, Linux robot, motors, sensors, serial port, the robot, usb devices, usb sound, usb to serial, usb to ttl

14 Nov 08 The Robot: A body, Sensors and Good Progress

Progress is going really well and I’m happy so far. Unfortunately I didn’t want to show the body yet as it is so far from finished but as I haven’t posted an update in a while I decided to just go with it.

The body is ever so slightly lop sided by a few mm here and there which is a shame however from a short distance you wouldn’t notice, it stands up straight and weight distribution is equal throughout the base plate so I’m happy with it. Ok, ‘professionally’ the body’s a mess however for my zero experience in that kind of work, I’m reasonably happy.

This is the front of it, top is a mounted webcam, to the left of that is a phidgets temperature sensor and top right is a phidgets light sensor. I am waiting to add 8 colored status LEDs around a small flat panel 5v stereo speaker as a ‘mouth’ (I got it from a Nokia phone bundle).
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Tags: battery pack, distance sensor, IR remotes, irda, LED, light sensor, Linux, Linux robot, MAX232, motor controller, nimh, phidget, phidgets sensor, picolcd, picopsu, polycarbonate glue, sabertooth, serial port, stereo speaker, temperature sensor, the robot, usb phidgets, usb sensor kit, webcam