His function is to serve as a learning platform for my self, and an excellent platform it as been.

The base is made of 1/8? thick by 8? in diameter aluminum stock. The circuit board sits atop four aluminum posts in the center of the disk. under that sits the power sours, four C size rechargeable NiCad,s for the motors and four AA?s for the logic. The circuit board is the Rug Warrior single board robot.

It?s processor is a Motorola 68hc11A1 with 32K of RAM. It has An LCD screen for debugging and sensor out put. An expansion header is mounted on the circuit board. The drive motors are modified servos made to rotate 360 degrees. The robot is programmed in Interactive C.

The only real problem I had was with the velocity monitoring circuit and hardware so I made some modifications. I Salvaged some encoder disks form a dead mouse and mounted then on brackets that hang over the wheels. The shaft of the encoder rests on and spins with the wheel. circuitry was built to count the tics of the encoder and indicate forward or backward movement This information is then conditioned with software. this is hocked into the boards original header pins and circuitry minus the resistors. It works great.

It took about two months to build to a basic working robot and is still in the works. Email me at: nicolson@oeonline.com .