General Purpose Robot Remote

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuwb3fn51r4]

[theGrue] has posted his Robot remote control project for us to gawk at. This box o’ buttons is a parallax propeller brain with some Xbee units for communication. Though it was designed to work with TOBI, his tool carrying robot, he made it so that he could control a multitude of robots with it by flipping some switches on the front of the remote.

[via Hacked Gadgets]

10 thoughts on “General Purpose Robot Remote

  1. A few years ago I built what I called a “Universal Calibrator” device which interfaced (wired, though, through either a 9-pin D-Sub or an RJ-45 with an adapter) to many of the PIC devices I was building at the time. Basically a single device to interface with multiple devices to get into a setup menu to change variables in the EEPROM memory or similar (depending on the target device) sorts of functions. It worked with a few devices, but I eventually ditched it because programming the target device with special code to detect and talk to the calibrator ended up being more hassle than it was worth.

    How is the accelerometer control interface working out? It seems like something you’d have to get used to. Being from the “Atari Age”, I find a joystick to be more intuitive. :) Also, an analog joystick would be easy to sense just how far a person was tilting it to vary the robot’s speed. Can’t you do that with the accelerometer?

  2. The accelerometer is quite easy to use to drive TOBI even in the tightest spaces of office buildings. To be more clear, the SPD or speed switch tells the robot to limit its maximum speed even if the accelerometer is sending faster speeds. The controller just sends the accelerometer readings with several variables that alter the behavior of the robot.

    We shall see how well it will interface with TOBI’s big brother soon.

  3. Addendum: on the marker advise; in chinese products they often just put a piece of black paper over the button that slides along inside the case, it looks nicer and stops dust from getting in them.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.