Tag: robot
Robots and Linux
October 30th, 2006, No Comments
What free time this month wasn’t sucked up by the Advogato migration was spent working on Tankbot GTR, the current DPRG group robot project. We now have the Mini-ITX mother board that Via donated mounted on the robot. We were doing our initial testing with an old 800MB laptop hard drive but it really sucked [...]
Random News from the Month of May
May 30th, 2005, No Comments
Yesterday Susan and I braved the scattered rain to attend Dallas Artfest 2005. It turned out to be overcast and cool but only a tiny bit of rain fell. Susan found some interesting jewellery and it made a nice break from work. I’ve been working with David Anderson in porting his robotics library for the [...]
Mini RoboMind
January 26th, 2005, No Comments
I’ve been doing some C programming lately on the MRM board, which uses a Motorola 68332 CPU. It’s not exactly a new chip but I think the last Motorola I did much development on was an HC11, so it’s definitely a step up from that. The board ships with an ancient GNU gcc 2.95.3 and [...]
Robots, robots, robots
October 4th, 2004, No Comments
Between the recent office move and keeping up with herds of cats, I’ve fallen a bit behind in reporting news in other areas. Work is still progressing on the Ultracap power supply. After some further testing of the cell-balancer circuit based on the TI TLV4112IP high-output-drive op-amp, I decided that, while working flawlessly otherwise, it [...]
Cats, Caps, and Contests
July 17th, 2004, No Comments
Ultracap Update After prototyping a cell-balancing circuit for my robot power supply based on Maxwell 350F Ultracaps, I discovered the original choice of the TI TLC25L4CN low-voltage op-amp was not a good one. The little chip just couldn’t deliver enough current to balance the cap voltages in any reasonable amount of time. The peak output [...]
DPRG and Robot News
June 23rd, 2004, No Comments
At the DPRG RBNO last night, I worked out the basic design for my robot power supply with the help of a few other DPRG folks. The plan is to use 4 of the Maxwell 350F caps to store power from solar cells. (Someone was asking about the cost – the single unit price of [...]
Robot Software Success
April 3rd, 2004, No Comments
I mentioned in my last entry that I’d been experimenting with the Not Quite C programming language for use with the Lego Spybotics brick. The hardware hack we made for line-following combined with a few lines of NQC code allowed one of the robots to successfully complete the line following course at Roborama 04.A (it [...]
Linux NQC for the Lego Spybotics Brick
March 31st, 2004, No Comments
When Frys was dumping Lego Spybotics hardware a while back for $29, quite a few DRPG people grabbed one or two of them. So we have a whole pile lying around and nobody knows quite what to do with them. The Spybotics brick is a bit more limited than the original RCX brick and, to [...]
