Another one started up!

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/media.html

2 million prize.

Good job, ucsb micromouse. They ended up winning 1st place. with a best time run of a little above a 60 seconds. Not bad. Now its tiem for next years mouse. Time to start working :)

Hey anyone who lives in southern california. The official date of the Southern Area MicroMouse competition is May 15. It'll be at UCLA. Cash prizes! Just letting those who wanted to know. I will try to make it to watch the ucsb team if they finish in time :).

The latest design for tiny bot has been brought down to a 1 inch by 1 inch PCB. Going out for fab now. the processor is a pic18f6520. I have two tiny h-bridge an IRDA circuit a .5 volt step up power supply. an rs232 chip. and Inputs for 6 analog sensors. I hope this board will make the nano- bot size limit :)

looks like the there are some teams doing stuff at the grand challenge. Even though I was not able to gather enough funding for my entry. I am glad that some teams were able to finish their entrys and pass the qualifications. My bets are on the Red team to move the most distance. But I don't think anyone will finish this year. Anyone what to join me for next year. Hopefully I'll have a radar system done by then.

Hey everyone. I started up a new project several months ago. you prob have seen the links on robots.com http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/ anyways project is moving along still, but I needed to find some people who are good at vision programming. also someone who is good at Localization and Mapping programming is needed also. i have most of the hardware finished or mid designed right now for truck control. I would just like to get the high level vision system as well as the mapping code started very soon.
BTW, I'm in the santa barbara area, so if anyone is interested email me at sashi@sashiono.com even if you are not from the area let me know.

My newest goal is to include a wireless networking into my tinybot project. The idea is to allow several tinybots to communicate with each other using Ad Hoc Routing to form a network of bots. I am reading on the uLunar ad hoc routing system

btw: The final choice for microcontrollers is the pic18f252. I will begin coding as soon as i get my order from digikey.

Well, I haven't posted for a while. So time for an update. I have put together the Mark III kit no problem. I have to give it to them for putting together a very easy to assemble kit. Took me only a few hours to get it driving around. i would recommend it to any first time robot builders. And for the price it isn't that bad, although they raised prices to 92.

I saw that the 18f series have been released and are being sold now. I may need to pick one of these up soon and see if i like them. I need to really start with Tinybot, now that I got all the parts together. I guess I should start coding and assembling it together. Anyways back to work.

I'm happy to state that I have won 4 1st place awards for my micromouse that I built for independent project class at UCSB. This last competition really blew my mind because I got the best time ever for my mouse. I ran a speed run in 14 seconds flat. that's without bonuses and such, just raw time. When I was putting together the micromouse I never really designed it to run that fast, but a few months ago I did some slight tweaking of the code to do straight aways and did some tweaking on the PID control loops to handle higher speed and I guess the result was evident. I think this was the last competition for this mouse and it time for it to retire. Only to come out for demo's and show and tells. Time for the next generation of mice to take rise and show their glory as this one has had its time. I really want others to build good mice as well. This year I was slightly disappointed in what I saw, I never saw any mice this year make it to the center. I think people are not getting enough guidance. So this is an invitation to anyone who is building a micromouse to get a hold of me or many of the other builders for some help. There is an IEEE micromouse help session coming up that hopefully be able to attend and contribute anything I can.

I just got a hold of a Mark III robot kit. I plan on putting it together soon. The reason i got it was to get started programming on a pic 16f877. I need to pick up some pic assembly and I figured the best way is to put together a bot that uses the microcontroller that I want to learn. I'm thinking of using the 16f876 to use in my tinybot project. It should be small enough and use low enough power. The reason I haven't done it yet is because there is really no good (free) ide besides the microchip assembler. And I really hate writing code in assembly, I'd much rather use C. I mean I can always get a hold of a C compiler but then debugging and simulating won't be too fun because I haven't seen any good C debuggers that are free. So I'm back to learning pic assembly as convoluted as it is. I just really hate dealing with old backwards compatible technology, you know with all this paging crap. I'd wish they would start selling the 18f series soon. I just saw that they released it on their website but I haven't found a place to buy them. Well Anyways, hopefully the mark III kit goes together smoothly and I'll be on my way to pic assembly world.