The standard JTAG connector for ARM processors is the huge 20 pin IDC header. It has a whole bunch of unused pins and takes up a lot of board space. There are a several alternatives that reduce the pin count but, for a bare minimum, you can use Serial Wire Debug (SWD)… (more…)
The recently announced STM32F4 series of processors using the ARM Cortex M4 are very attractive. High speeds, large memory space and a floating point unit are among the obvious benefits although there are many other architectural changes in the ST chips. This evening, I managed to get my STM32F4-Discovery board doing something…
(more…)
There is a long-held view that robots will, or should, exist to relieve human from the drudgery of everyday life. They should be used for tasks too tedious, or too dangerous for humans to perform. Now, at last, both goals have been achieved in one robot… (more…)
The Taiwan 2011 Micromouse and intelligent Robots Contest was a great success. Our primary contest organiser Juing-Huei Su has evidently been busy with the vido editing software as he has now uploaded the contest videos… (more…)
Last month, the International Conference on Robotics and Intelligent Systems (IROS) celebrated 50 years of robotics. If the program was anything to go by, there was more going on than a team of interested people could keep up with. New Scientist has a short video of some of the more…
The American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who has died aged 70 after a long illness, was one of the co-inventors of the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Unix and C provided the infrastructure software and tools that created much of today's computing environment – from the internet…
The front, or forward-facing, sensors on a micromouse have several uses. Apart from detecting the distance to walls ahead and obstacles on one side or another, properly setup forward sensors can be used to measure an angular error with respect to a wall ahead of the mouse… (more…)
The 2012 APEC event will take place at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort, Orlando, Florida on February 5th-9th 2012. On the evening of Monday 6th February there will the be 2012 APEC micromouse contest. Registrations are open now. You can find out more at the APEC site.
While your micromouse is exploring the maze, it is important to make sure that it stays well aligned as much as possible. This is probably more difficult in some ways than during a speed run. A particular difficulty can be an accurate and repeatable 90 degree turn… (more…)
My micromouse, Decimus 2A, has not been behaving well. The most notable problem is that detection of the wall ahead, and the distance to that wall has been erratic. Worse, the problem seems to come and go. For a while I thought I might have damaged an emitter or had a dry joint but, when I looked again at the calibration figure, the left front sensor was giving a reading much smaller than the right front sensor… (more…)