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.
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…
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…
Once all the parts have been chosen and the schematics drawn, it is just a case of getting on with building the bits…
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 …
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)
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…
Derek Hall has just put up a new video on YouTube from the UK 2008 micromouse competition. It show his mouse, MouseX2, pitted against my mouse (Decimus). A bit of split-screen trickery shows the two mice running the same course. Vary handy that as I can now see exactly where…
A Japanese blog now has pretty complete details of a half size, stepper-driven micromouse. Over a period of only a few weeks, there have been posts covering the mechanical design, software and circuit details of a complete mouse and several videos of it performing in a test maze. (more…)
Sometimes the simplest things can be tricky to achieve. Of the several mice I have build, one of the hardest things to find can be a suitable skid for the front and back of the mouse. On the latest micromouse test-bed, the base is several millimeters off the floor. Too…