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Building and Programming an Asuro Robot in Linux?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the domo-arigato-mr-roboto dept.

0R35T35 asks: "I'm currently in the process of building an Asuro mobile robot, and am startled to find (through Google) that there aren't any English speaking community sites for this robot kit. Does anyone know of sites or resources devoted to this cute little guy, or have an Asuro of their own?"

20 comments

  1. Sigh by fm6 · · Score: 0, Troll

    http://www.google.com/search?q=asuro+english+forum

    1. Re:Sigh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Anybody else getting really annoyed by these shoot-from-the-hip posters who assume that a simple Google search will answer any question?

      Please point out an English forum in your results. I see several non-english forums, a German forum but no English forums.

    2. Re:Sigh by fm6 · · Score: 1

      I don't think a Google search can answer any question. But the ones it can answer don't belong in Ask Slashdot.

  2. I have just the site for you: by Anonymous+Crowhead · · Score: 4, Funny

    This should help.

  3. Don't Mod Parent Up! by fm6 · · Score: 1

    I can say that 'cause I wrote it. I was just pointing out something that should have been obvious. Save your mod points for posts that matter.

  4. Mod this parent up by aitikin · · Score: 1

    I agree in full

    --
    "Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
  5. Old idea. by babbling · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    It's already been done before.

  6. Three words. by Orrin+Bloquy · · Score: 1

    Best. Prom. Ever.

    --
    "Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on /. and I must look smart."
    1. Re:Three words. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That. made. my. day.

  7. Well... I can give you something close by technoextreme · · Score: 3, Informative

    Heheheh... After reading through the instructions I realized what microcontroller it ran on. The microcontroller itself has a very large following. Im sure these people will help you program your little bitty robot. http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?POSTNUKESID=17f 53fb2c3f81f15a81c3e573d6d8bbc

    --
    Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
  8. This right here by Scrameustache · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The microcontroller itself has a very large following.

    This is why I come to slashdot : )

    --

    You can't take the sky from me...

  9. From the linked blog... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "Transmitting information back to the PC for analysis was a bit of a pain - the line sensor information is stored in an unsigned int array. The serial connection can only send characters, so I had to find a way to convert between the two."

    Is it just me, or is there something seriously wrong with this statement?

    1. Re:From the linked blog... by topham · · Score: 1

      Nothing wrong with it; but...

      "serial connection can only send characters". Perhaps (A guess I admit) he means 7 bit characters. In which case sending binary data is a pain in the butt. base64 to the rescue if that's the case.

    2. Re:From the linked blog... by sophanes · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Depends. From what I can gather, the author is trying to send an array of integers to the serial port. To do this, the uC forms a character string from the array of integers using sprintf() then sends the string. This is a pretty inefficient way of doing things (particularly given the bloat in avr-libc's string handling).

      A much better idea would be to set the USART to use 8 data bits and then send the array 1 byte at a time - trivial if you are using 8-bit integers, but requires a 16-bit integer to be sent as two bytes - and stitching the data back together at the host PC end. PC resources are cheap, uC resources are scarce.

    3. Re:From the linked blog... by topham · · Score: 1

      I know, I've done it myself 15 years ago. (serial communications mostly limited to PCs, I really dislike 8250's and all their variants, tons of bugs and each chip a bit different than the last.). (Debugging a communications Library I paid for wasn't my idea of fun either.).

      I really wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt; but in this case I think you're right.

      There is no way you should be able to solder together a micro-robot, compile the tools necessary to write code and write some actual code for it without understanding all the reasonable alternatives to using sprintf to output a few unsigned ints.

      I admit, as a quick test-hack I might have compiled in sprintf just to see if the data generated might be useful. In this case it could easily be skewing his results though as the comment on his blog indicates serial communications aren't interrupt driven in which case the sprintf routine, a long with the extra bytes he is sending could be very detrimental to his results.

      I am amazed at the number of programmers I run in to that don't have any understanding of the underlying system they are using. I admit most of my programming these days is quite high level; but even so a basic understanding is required in any programming curriculum I am aware of.

  10. Re:Well... I can give you something close by sophanes · · Score: 1

    I couldn't find any reference to what type of Atmel microcontroller this project uses - I guess it must be one of the smaller ones considering the amount of flash is an issue. But yeah, the Atmel series of microcontrollers is great to play around with, particularly the ATMEGA128.

  11. start one! by dopez · · Score: 2, Insightful

    How about starting a community?

    I also found out that there aren't much english forums or websites for the Asuro, though Arexx does have an english forum for their robot : http://www.arexx.com/forum/index.php?c=5&language= english

    But i found out most of the people at http://www.roboternetz.de/phpBB2/index.php wouldn't mind to answer a few questions in english once in a while. (though you might want to babelfish a few words to figure out which forum to post in)

    I though already to start a site or forum about the Asuro but figured there wouldn't be much (if any) interest in an english forum or site but maybe i was wrong?

  12. Try this place by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    http://www.linux-hacker.net/
    They have a robot section.