Sending data over SPI with the STM32 using polling is simple and reliable but your processor is blocked, unable to do anything else until the transfer is complete. Direct Memory Access (DMA) allows you to initiate a transfer of a block of data and then carry on doing something else…
The STM32F4xx devices are not short of pins and they can be more flexibly used than on the STM32F1xx types. On a micromouse though, there is not a lot of physical space and I am not good at routing lots of traces around a board. Since I had already decided…
In an effort to minimise the amount of space taken up on my micromouse board, I wanted to use the internal oscillator (HSI) built in to the STM32F4 device I am using. As ever, working out how to set that up in code is not obvious. However, ST do have…
The APEC 2012 contest had a good turnout of mice. There wer, I believe, 19 entries. For some reason, I failed to get good pictures of all of them but here are some images of most of them… (more…)
APEC 2012 was a great micromouse event. Held at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Florida, there were some fantastic entries. Derek Hall and Jim Chidley have produced a compilation of the speed runs from the contest... You may notice that the apparent speed of the mouse does not seem…
I can't believe this isn't done more often. Hayama Kiyoteru has put a video camera on one of his mice and set it loose in the micromouse maze. http://youtu.be/DbnPSz3S_x8 Find out more about this here http://plaza.rakuten.co.jp/CPU4Edu/diary/201202100000/.
Minos is upon us. It is now possible to register for the 2012 Minos event which takes place on April 14th and 15th at Royal Holloway, University of London., Our twelfth weekend conference on micromouse and other robotics related matters follows the success of previous MINOS events. We will also run…
When I applied power to the motors on Zeetah VI (ZVI) for the first time, the motors seemed to struggle and the PWM value to get the wheels to rotate seemed higher than usual. Since this was my first four wheel mouse of this configuration (ZIV is a four wheel drive, four wheel steer mouse), I wasn’t sure if the higher load was normal or not.
Having seen quite a lot of variability in the output from the encoders on my micromouse, I got to wondering how much backlash there really is in the gear train. Finally, I figured the easiest way to measure it would be to send the motors back and forward alternately while holding…
You could be forgiven for thinking that a micromouse contest - particularly the All Japan micromouse contest - is one of the most photographed and filmed events there are. All day there are cameras going. Pretty well all of the resulting imagery does not get to see the light of…