Category: Software

Took a few minutes tonight to rip apart an old Eeeeee PC knock-off and embed it within the robot. I was planning on just throwing my raspberry pi in there, but this thing was just gathering dust on the shelf and could probably use some love.

Over the next week I’ll throw together a simple serial interface board for the digital I/Os on the bot and a python interface to the web!

Anyway, here’s some pictures of the teardown and repurposing. Enjoy!

[warning_box] No science actually happened here. [/warning_box]

 

A few weeks ago there was This Guy up on the Dangerous Prototypes site. It looked like fun so I picked one up! It arrived yesterday and I spent a half hour or so toying with it, then I started to take it apart!

Last week I was able to get FRED’s I/O board working, so the next step was to get some interesting I/Os happening! Unfortunately during the configuration change a external emergency stop jumper was loosened (but not removed) so that took an hour or so to sort out.

This is the first I/O I’ve had setup on the robot. I wanted him to be running in a loop until the the I/O was triggered but I can’t seem to find a conditional jump in the programming system. In the current setup I just have him wait for the state change.

[dropcap]The Robots[/dropcap] are getting a hard reset. In a recent Amp Hour Podcast (#125) Dave from the EEVblog and Chris from Chris Gammell’s Analog Life were discussing open hardware with Ian from Dangerous Prototypes. The guts of the show was that open source hardware/software is the way to go with a project like this. Starting out I had delusions that this would be a marketable product, but the reality is unless I have outrageous amounts of funding to get these things UL listed, they’ll never see commercial production.  So, world, here ya go. I’ll start posting what I’ve got so far.