Slashdot Mirror
Simple and Cheap Robotic Projects?
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?"
Does your laptop have a parallel port? Here, here, and here are good places to look for schematics/project ideas. You can scavenge stepper motors out of dead hard drives and floppy drives. Here's a nice project that demonstrates building DC drive controller w/proportional speed control. Neat! I haven't built any such animals since my C64 and TI-994/a were new and shiny.
Here come da fudge!
Well, first the disclaimer - I know nothing about this project that I will link to, but was pretty interested in the same thing.
I've written a bunch of book reviews, including those on Slashdot, and some publishers are sending me now catalogs with upcoming titles as part of their reviewing program.
So, anyway, Wiley has this book with the robot kit, that they plan the next edition of some time this September, although the publisher told me before that the deadline might move into the future. I have not read the previous edition, nor have I played with it.
It seems to have received brilliant reviews on Amazon for that 1999 edition, so I'd suggest just perusing it and maybe buying the book+kit used if it's in buildable condition (i.e. not the robot that is already all built, polished, given guns and ammo, and right now just needs the ON switch to be turned).
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
If I'm not mistaken I believe that Scott Edwards is one of the most prominent of the latest generation of robotics pioneers. His SSC and other projects have (in my opinion) helped to shape the aftermarket/hobbyist robotics industry.
I wanted to give him due propers for his project back in 1996, but I never really had an opportunity (I was too busy studying women and beer at FSU at the time).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
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
I'm surprised no one has suggested a Basic Stamp. Personally I have stopped using them because I started needing more power on my projects, but for simple robot platforms, they are a pretty good teaching tool. If you get a BS2 kit with one of the books to go a long with it, you'll basically have everything you need to get started. You wont have laptop control, but if you are interested in controlling it with a laptop I would try rentron and get some transmitters/receivers and play with making it wireless. The basic stamp is limited in it's ability, but its hard to find any other kind of robot kit that comes with an entire curriculum like anything from parallax does.