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Old Toy Modding?
Sqwubbsy writes "Stumbling through Google, looking for info on the Big Trak by Milton Bradley, I came across an article about one that was retrofitted with an OOPic controller. I was wondering if anyone else had a good story about a retrofitted toy that they beefed up?"
You can get a lot of uC's cheap, but you have to (a) make hardware for them and (b) program in assembler or shell out some big bucks for development environment. Then you spend so much time doing housekeeping code you've lost any interest in the project.
If you want to get into in microcontrollers, the oopic is a great place to start. The oopic (based on the microchip PICMicro chips) has an on-board object oriented programming language based around hardware objects (dc motors, servos, etc). The software is free. You code a few lines up and *bingo* working robotics.
Then after you've used them for a while, you can move up to bigger and more powerful things. Atmel cpus, PICMicros in assembler and C, TINI boards.
This is a running problem with most batteries when operating a motor. Unless the battery is entirely solid state and doesn't decay over time, the voltage it supplies drops as it gets used up. Problem continues to exist today with Lego Mindstorm robots as well. To correct for this, one would want to put a sensor which senses the rotating shaft on the motor -- keep rotating motor until it's gone through the proper amount of degrees instead of just supplying driving voltage for about the right amount of time.
You like splinters in your crotch? -Jon Caldara
well, a quick google found this:c lock.ht m
http://users.actcom.co.il/meccano/riefler_
the main site:
http://users.actcom.co.il/meccano/
They have examples of a bunch of meccano clocks and other devices.
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That would still give you problems on different surfaces, which affect the degrees turned per unit time or whatever very substantially, due to slip between the wheel and the carpet. The only way of doing it properly, I think, is to install a compass or equivalent.
The only sensors I have that are useful for this are the infra red radar trick, and a parking radar kit which has more range but eats batteries and is rather ugly.
In my case, at every search (when looking for paths by spinning round), if it finds 1 feature in roughly 360 degrees I use that to set the effective turn time step. I could add some sort of pattern matching algorithm for more complex cases, but life is too short.