12.11.06
Status of the ZBot
Ive finally had some time to do a little work on this projct. Being someone that wants everything done right, and to learn, do everything by myself, where it would normally take a weekend to knock some crappy robot together takes a little longer!
Firstoff, I have treated myself to a Robo Jr Chassis from www.active-robots.com, mainly because of the price. The only quarm i have with it is that because it uses tiny 5V motors and tiny cogs not particullay securely mounted, it makes a right racket. Maybe in the future it could be modded to use motors with internal step downs.
On the code front, I still cant decide what to do with the IR proximity detectors. I have wasted LOADS of time writing some cool I2C Multi-Master routines so that I can connect devices (the IR’s) to the I2C bus and address them whenever I want.
The thing is, I still cant decide if its the best idea. Since I also fancy, instead of using some IR transmitter reciever that I have built, to use one of them sharp distance finders and use that as a combined Proximity detect/range finder. That would be cool. I still might want to do it on the I2C bus though to make the comms wiring nice and simple.
Hence, I have also built a simple proximity detector that literally takes uA’s to run. This uses a pic to control the most power hungry device on the IR circuit, the TSOP38 blah… reciever. With it permanently turned on, the curret will be about 800uA. Which is poo.
And also, I have done a VERY simple PWM test to test the motors. Works good.
Well there we are. Till next time….
Phil