Ok, it's been a while. I've been doing things like being in a musical, playing World of Warcraft, and learning the violin that have been taking up much of my time. However, I've made some progress on my robot. First of all, I've decided to go with an Arduino Diecimila board for the main controlling board. I had attempted to create a breakout board for the dsPIC processor, but my boardmaking skills just don't seem to be good enough. Sure I could order custom boards, but that gets expensive. Anyways, the arduino was only about $40 after shipping and everything. I chose this because it's a popula...

I didn't do too much this weekend. I ended up putting the shell on and raced the car around again with my boyfriend. I also drew up a circuitboard design for the breakout board. So the next step is creating and assembling the circuitboard. Then once that's tested, I can figure out how I'm going to go about with programming it for the time being. I'm hoping I can just connect it to my existing programmer by building some kind of interface. After that I can start breadboarding out the actual circuitry. I also need to find a high-level block diagram I drew up for how the circuit will interact, al...

I went ahead and bought the remainder of the parts although I ended up needing to stop at 2 Radioshacks to get everything. I went ahead and put together some wiring adapters and finished hooking everything up. I recalibrated the steering and had to reverse the direction of the ESC through the remote, although I could have simply switched the colored wires. I used velcro to hold the battery cover in place and after putting the cover over the electronics and securing the extra antenna wire, it was ready to go. So I went ahead and took it outside to get an idea of it's capabilities. It raced just...

Last night, I went ahead and bought an ESC and a new battery. The ESC was quite a bit cheaper than I was expecting at only $30. I got a new battery because it was a NiMH (Nickel-metal Hydrite) and had a much bigger capacity 3000mAh (milliAmp Hours) over my old NiCd battery with only 1200mAh although they had batteries with capacities up to 5000mAh. I also discovered a hidden battery compartment for the old circuitry that could hold 4 AA batteries, although I don't currently need it. I may make use of that if I feel it could be beneficial to any additional circuitry. The ESC was able to provide...

Ok, here's what I did last night. I started trying to design the new circuit and realized I would need some kind of transistors to drive the motors, so I decided to go a different, but easier route. I checked the value of the potentiometer inside of the pseudoservo and it tested at 5K ohms. Then I took apart my existing servo, and did a little testing. Inside the potentiometer was reading at 2.6K ohms, but I figured it might have another resistor in parallel, which would drop the resistance, so I desoldered it from the circuit board (after carefully diagramming it) and retested the potentiomet...

It's been a while since I updated this page. Since my last entry, I made many design changes. First of all, I decided to go with a dsPIC33F device that is specifically designed for motor control. It has many nice features that would make future expansion of the robot very simple. However, in order to use it, I need to have an ICD (In-Circuit Debugger) to program it since making some kind of adapter for my programmer would be impractical and the ICD allows debugging straight from the software, which is very nice. I went ahead and built a USB version of an ICD clone, but when I attempted to plug...

Ok, so here's what I did this past weekend. I started by working on the steering. To start with, when I loosely put the old parts in, I realized there was a new problem. The servo has a larger turn radius than the old motor. So, I needed to redesign how the steering worked somewhat. I decided to go with a steering method similar to what was originally in the car. The first step was to figure out how long to make a lever to make use of the turn radius of the servo in order to get the full turn radius of the wheels. I did a measurement or how far a know lever turned on the motor and using tangen...

Most of my work up to this point has been research, collecting tools, and getting some code working for the microprocessor. I also took the original 27MHz circuit board and diagrammed a schematic out. A few days ago I started implementing the mechanical changes and upgrades to the truck. I ordered some books on robotics to help out with some of the details as well as to provide an easy reference if I need it. I've been able to do more work on it lately since I was off work to recover from having gallbladder surgery.

So far I have taken the truck apart down to small pieces and started the repla...

I have been working on converting a radio control truck into a robotic truck. It's not going to be an android (human-like) like many people associate with the word "robot", but rather I'm implementing an electronic "brain" along with some sensors and other features. I may do something like giving it the ability to store "tricks" into it's memory, but that can come later. This webpage is to document my progress as well as provide updates for anybody interested.

The plan is to use a pic16F877a microprocessor for the central control and add additional components as needed. One of the nice feature...