RC truck source for robotics platform
posted Mar 5th 2010 2:15pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: robots hacks
[Michael] sent us a link to his RC robotic platform. He started with the same RC toy as the iPhone Robot (CAR) but ended up with a blank slate waiting for more features. What he has is an Arduino with a motor driver, three bump switches for the front and rear, and a XBee module. On the other side of things he used a SparkFun USB to FTDI connector to interface another XBee module with a PC in order to use Processing.
In the clip after the break you can see the motor control needs to have more fine-tuning done so the beast isn’t just out of control when running. But there’s a ton of potential here. It should not be a problem to add at lease rudimentary video feedback from the device. The Arduino is currently only being used marginally, leaving plenty of space to add on-board sensing such as IR, proximity, or light.
It’s a clean start, we expect to see updates!
The XBEE data rate is so low I doubt video feedback would be manageable. A couple years ago I streamed low quality audio across it; I think that about maxed out the bandwidth.
Granted, 802.15.4 isn’t suited to such data rates, but it’s certainly something I’d expect to see posted on HAD: utilizing the full potential of the XBEE/802.15.4/ZigBee bandwidth.
An excellent, old school robotics platform is the HandyBoard from MIT. I know many colleges use (or used) these boards to teach intro to EE/CPE. I was so inspired I bought the blank PCB, then purchased all the components and made my own. It’s got lots (8 or more) ditital I/O, 6 or so analog inputs, motor drivers built in, and an IR link. Interfacing an XBEE shouldn’t be that difficult, but one would most likely have to bit-bang the serial interface (I don’t recall if the 68HC11 has a UART – I doubt it does).