Robots

Having read the countless articles, websites and hearing about it from friends, I’ve decided to jump on the Arduino bandwagon.  I bought one of the new ArduinoMega boards with a very nice shield and some other things.    The ArduinoMega is an Arduino compatible board with an ATmega1280 controller that has 128KB flash, 8KB SRAM and 4KB EEPROM.  It has ...

Did you just buy a Wii-mote for a robotics project and you can’t wait to use it?  If you have a 15-tonne hydraulic grappling arm at your disposal, you could do what these guys did. I am sure this beats the crap out of whatever you had in mind of controlling with that Wii-mote.  Feeling inadequate yet? [Source: Entity Crisis ...

“Subsumption?” I hear you say, “What’s that?”  Subsumption is a form of behaviour based robotics where multiple behaviours can control a robot using a hierarchical system.  However, don’t take my word for it!  Check out Thom Roach’s great new blog.  He’s written some really ace articles on the subject without reverting to dry stuffy theory like you see in most ...

Several months ago I saw on the Mindsensors website that they were looking for beta testers for their upcoming Line Leader sensor.  I applied and shortly thereafter I was contacted by one of the guys there named Deepak. He told me they were still in Alpha testing phase but that they’d get back to me when they were ready to ...

It’s been a little while since my last article about adding peripherals to the NXT, but not due to the lack of experimenting and programming, let me tell you.  In my quest to tame the Maxim MAX127, I ran into a few annoying bugs in RobotC.  The first one involved not being able to use structs of bytes to send ...

Next Saturday (21 July 2008 ) I am giving a presentation on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller and I thought it would be a nice idea to demo some things with it.  I have a Propeller Education Kit (PEK) and a Propeller Proto Board (PPB), kindly donated to me by Parallax.  The PEK is awesome for learning how to use the ...

My current project, well, the one I seem to be spending the most time on is a robot called A-Maze-Ing. It is based on a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick. This robot is, or rather, will be, a line-maze solving robot. The first challenge in building this robot was its size. Rules dictate the robot should not exceed 15x15x15 cm at ...

It seems it’s been years since I last blogged anything.  I used to run a blog at mightor.blogspot.com but I guess I ran out of ideas to post about.  This blog’s title is a good summation of what I think about when I am at work or doing something I’m not really enjoying. I’ve been building robots for a little ...