Robo Bot Nick

IDEA
Video Rating: 0 / 5

Trossen Robotics Demos a Hexapod Crawling Robot Controlled by Visual Studio @ PDC 2005

This is a small project I have been working on to control a vex motor and eventually a full blown robot from the computer via a joystick. It uses a basic Saitek joystick hooked up to a custom C# program which gets the axis and button values from it via directx directinput. The values are then scaled to 0 to 180 and sent out over serial to the arduino in much the same manner that my serial controlled stepper motor worked. When the arduino receives the instructions it then extracts the value and sets the motor to the value (speed). It can also work for a servo motor by simply changing the cable. This system will soon be deployed a robot similar to by bluetooth tank but it will have a live video feed on the computer screen and it will be controlled via a joystick instead of keys!!! Here is the source code, download the arduino joystick code for the code that was on the arduino, and the working joystick test for the C# code. code.google.com You should check out this tutorial which got me started, I give full credit to the author for the sample code I used. www.codeproject.com Keep in mind you have to download the directx SDK which is about 600mb the link is in the tutorial above.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

This is a MINDSTORM NXT Car controlled by phidgets joystick sensor over the bluetooth network.

Finally got an Arduino. If you don’t know what that is, it’s a tiny microcontroller board based around an Atmel ATMega328 (at least on the newest models) microcontroller chip. The Vex robotics platform has its own microcontroller but it is expensive and requires an expensive programming cable (I have the controller but without the cable it is only good for R/C control). The Arduino is interfaced to the laptop using a MAX232 RS-232 to TTL serial adapter (the Arduino supports USB but my old laptop only has one USB port which I’m using for the Xbox 360 controller). The LED flashes GREEN when it receives a good serial “frame” (4 bytes; 255, motor1, motor2, 200) and RED when the serial frame fails (first and last byte aren’t 255 and 200). This is because simply sending two values would get mixed up between the two motors and it wouldn’t work correctly. The hardest part was actually getting the PC to read the Xbox controller, the Arduino side was fairly easy to get working. I plan to eventually get a netbook and use USB and WiFi to drive it around the common area from my desktop Sorry about the resolution…forgot my camera was in the lowest possible settings I’ll upload more videos as I make progress on the robot (just got Arduino yesterday).