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Simple and Cheap Robotic Projects?

Posted by Cliff on from the automatons-on-a-budget dept.

siavash_of_stockholm asks: "I have a lot of spare time this so summer, so I've decided to be productive and make my own simple robot. It will come with some basic functions and it should move around without colliding or somehow avoid getting stuck in small areas and so on. I'd prefer to do this without using the popular Lego Mindstorm-kits and instead try to use a laptop and a controller card for the motors and a cheap webcam for vision. Has anyone in the Slashdot community made a similar project (on a tight student budget) and have some documentation of it they can share?"

2 of 43 comments (clear)

  1. Memory wire by Glonoinha · · Score: 4, Informative

    Check out the Robot Store and pay attention to all the cool things like engines, logic modules, and memory wire.

    Have fun, make me one too.

    --
    Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
  2. Use a microcontroller by Laser+Dan · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wouldn't use a laptop, then you have to have a robot big enough to carry it around. You are also pretty much limited to the parallel port for I/O.

    Look into microcontrollers (the most common are the Microchip PIC and Atmel AVR

    A microcontroller will give you heaps more I/O pins, and PWM for driving motors, serial ports, analog/digital converters etc Both PICs and AVRs are available with all sorts of combinations of features.

    There are plenty of resources available for both, look in newsgroups and search with google. GCC for the AVR is available for linux and windows so you can easily write C/C++ code for them. Also look into AVRfreaks
    Look at the newsgroup comp.robotics.misc for other people doing similar things.

    Good luck!
    -Daniel