My Design Lab, a.k.a. Senior Project, class started this week. I have two quarters to create my project. I think that I am going to do a six-legged servo walker instead of three wheels. There is one more secret part to the locomotion but I can't let that out yet! I'll have an estimated timeline and link to some 3D models next week.

For the next two quarters I have a Design Lab class which is a Senior project for the Computer Engineering Technology Degree at my school, Shawnee State University. In case your wondering, Computer Engineering Technology is a blend of Computer Engineering and Computer Science. It's a really good mix for robotics, which is why I chose SSU. Anyway, I'm going to do a wi-fi controlled robot that I've dubbed "Wibot". My plan, for now, is to use a mini itx board (easy to add storage and wifi) for the main controller and atmel chips for pwm and sensors. I'll probably use some flavor of linux for the os and make a user interface with glade. For locomotion I'm working with a 3-wheeled dc-motor controlled system. That may change, though, as I am very interested in using a dual tank track system. If anyone has ever used wifi to control a robot I'd appreciate suggestions. I'll get a project site up soon with more details and pics.

I recently added distance sensing ability to a Yost Engineering BugBrain that I built a few years ago. I wanted it to have some sort of vision capability so I added a Sharp GP2Y0A21YK ir distance sensor. It was pretty easy to add, just six solder points. All you have to do is connect power, ground, and and I/O pin which I connected to the expansion connector. I used the built in BasicX getADC() function to find the voltage output by the detector. The ir detector outputs a voltage between around 0.5-2.5V which corresponds to distances between 10cm and 80cm. I used the graph from the data sheet to make a look-up table which I use to compare the voltage and find the distance. This works pretty well and now my BugBrain walks around, "sees" objects, and avoids them. I've got some pics but I'm a noob to posting here (although I've been reading for quite a while) so I can't post the project yet. I've got a really sweet project coming up that I'd like to post. It's my Senior Project for school (Shawnee State University) but I'll post more on that later.