Sunday, May 30, 2010

Smaller Junkbot a successful project!

During the last 2 months I have built a varity of notable projects. (and a larger varity of not-notable projects!) First of all, the "junkbot" mentioned a while ago has made a great shelf for holding my project parts, if that tells you anything.
However, I have successfully transfered the servos onto another smaller robotics platform that I made out of plywood. I used 2 PING sensors that I got out of the "Traveling Junk box" that has been circulating to members of the Savage Circuits forum to do distace detection, and I used the Xbee transievers to do data extange and control. The robot relays distance data back to the base system that is displayed on a composite TV screen salvaged from an old DVD player. It is controlled with a 4X4 matrix keypad read by a Propeller microcontroller and sent through the Xbee module. The bot itself is a 16X16 inch square of plywood controlled by a Propeller microcontroller and driven by 2 servos. It receives Xbee data and then controls the servos accordingly. If the keypad code is entered, the bot is set to "autopilot mode" and roams around on it's own using the PING sensors for object detection.
This may seem great, and the development did go very well, but there is one error. For some reason the PINGs stop working after the servos are powered up. I don't understand it as the PINGs are controlled by a different power supply, but they still do it. There should be no prossesing problems as the PINGs and the servos are in 2 seperate cogs (Propeller cores).
I will update any progress on this and if the problem is solved then I will put the code on my site. Thanks for reading!