Adding an optical mouse sensor to an autonomous vehicle

optical-mouse-sensor-for-autonomous-vehicle

[Tim] is getting his drone ready for SparkFun's 2013 Autonomous Vehicle Competition on June 8th. He has a pretty good start, but was having some problems accurately measuring travel distance. The technique he chose for the task was to glue magnets onto the axles of the vehicle and monitor them with a hall effect sensor. Those sensors are finicky and a few problems during testing prompted him to … [Read more...]

AVC from the vehicle’s perspective

avc-from-vehicle-point-of-view

Team 0x27 was the winner of this year's AVC, the Autonomous Vehicle Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. You'll find video of the two runs from this entry (the third run did not finish). We love it that there's an on-board camera recording both video and sound of the race from the vehicle's point of view. They haven't updated their team page yet but we're sure they will once their done … [Read more...]

Cramming for Sparkfun’s Autonomous Vehicle Competition

cramming-for-sparkfun-avc

[Paul Breed] participated in this year's Autonomous Vehicles Contest put on by SparkFun Electronics. As with most projects, the deadline really snuck up on him and he ended up cramming a bunch of code development into the waning days before the competition. His experiences are shared in this recent blog post. One big part of the hardware is a laser range finder used for wall following. This is … [Read more...]