Author Topic: Tech project  (Read 4048 times)

Bobbias

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Tech project
« on: February 18, 2011, 05:52:29 PM »
Arduino has arrived, now it's time to play with it.

I posted in the happy thread about an Arduino arriving, this is about what I'm gonna be doing with the Arduino.

So far I have created a simple program on the Arduino which takes serial input and outputs the decimal value for each byte that it receives, and a simple console application in C# to communicate with it, proving that I can easily communicate between the Arduino and the computer.

I'm gonna be using the Arduino for a tech project for my college program. A friend of mine and I got our hands on an old-ass robot, and our project is going to involve using the Arduino to be the new brains for the robot. The original "brains" if you can even call them that, were just a bunch of 7400 series logic chips and a couple servo driver chips that took parallel inputs from a computer and translated them into commands to the servo controllers, which then did whatever you wanted the thing to do. All the real brains had to be a on a computer.

I'm trying to basically create a new set of brains for the robot so that it doesn't need to be connected to a computer. Ideally it will be able to store a program on board, which is interpreted by a custom program in the Arduino which sends commands to the steppers. This may or may not be actually feasible without getting a lot more hardware, because I have a feeling that the memory on the Ardunio is too limiting for this, but that's a discussion for later.

The other part of the project is that we want to make it manually controllable via a joystick of some kind. We don't know whether we'll be able to connect a joystick right to the Arduino somehow, or whether we'll be connecting through USB. Ideally we want to be able to connect directly to the Arduino so that we can set it to playback or manual control modes without even being connected to a computer. However, that may not be possible with the time and money we have available.

I'll be posting here with updates periodically on the progress of the project, and I'll probably be using my tumblr for progress updates as well.
This is going in my sig. :)

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flaffl

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Re: Tech project
« Reply #1 on: February 18, 2011, 06:30:32 PM »
cool story bro

also, pretty sure this belongs in a different forum

Bobbias

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Re: Tech project
« Reply #2 on: February 18, 2011, 07:08:17 PM »
I thought about that too, but the other forums don't get as much attention as this one does. It I stuck it in the Creations forum it probably wouldn't have even gotten a reply...
This is going in my sig. :)

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