RoboTIC 2008
Our winter event is RoboTIC, hed at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham. This year we gathered on Saturday 29th November and held the usual semi-formal set of competitions…
Bob’s second outing
Bob has had a bit of minor surgery. I replaced the Darlington transistor motor driver with a L293D chip. Thing is, I forgot that the 293 has relatively large losses so Bob was much slower…
Line Follower First run
All the bits are together and the processor code tested. Bob should know when he is on track and how far out he is when he is off track. Time to get him running on the test track…
Line Follower Sensors Setup
With the sensors installed and the robot pretty well complete, it is time to see if they can actually do the job they were designed for. the idea is that the line of sensors will be able to measure the robots offset from the centre of the line over as wide a range as possible.
Line Follower Test Track
You can’t build a line follower without a test track to run it on. The proposed UK rules for this competition specify the track to be on a 300mm grid with fixed turn radii of 150mm. Well, I don’t have room for that and I don’t want to make tiles either so a little lateral thinking is called for…
Line follower sensor experiments
The simplest arrangement for a line follower is probably two sensors with digital outputs. As long as one can see the line and the other can see the background, the controller is happy otherwise it must turn left or right as appropriate. I was after something a bit more sophisticated for Bob the Line follower…
Bob the Line Follower – the build
Once all the parts have been chosen and the schematics drawn, it is just a case of getting on with building the bits…
New line follower robot
Line followers are a perennial favourite of the small robot builder. It is not hard to make something that will bumble about and follow a line marked out on the floor. the technology can be very simple but the same basic idea is used in sophisticated robots on factory floors. The tricky part is in making the line-follower fast and smooth in its response. Whether or not I can do that remains to be seen but I am going to have a go …
Winmaze – Another Maze Editor
This program is no longer available. Instead, you might like to use:
https://github.com/micromouseonline/pyqt-maze-editor
It seems that all micromouse builders get around to writing their own software for displaying and editing mazes in the end. This is mine. It is a Windows only application but should run on pretty well any version of Windows. I have not tested it on Vista. It can open maze files of several types including the ‘standard’ binary mazes and some types of text maze. Changes to a maze will always be saved as a binary maze file. (note: revision now will not ask for libraries)
STM32 and the Segger/IAR J-Link
I finally got a day to play with some of my new toys. These are the IAR STM32-SK and the IAR J-Link debugger.The IAR J-Link is a re-badges Segger unit and I believe they are identical. I was quite excited about having a real debugger to use. – especially as programming the STM32 through the bootloader is a bit of a fiddle. Things didn’t turn out quite as I had hoped…
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