Category Archives: Robotics

Over the summer, I’ve been working on restructuring much of the robot—both to reduce its physical size and to reduce its power requirements.

A short (and incomplete) list of changes:

1. Switch from old laptop motherboard to an Artigo pico-itx computer
2. Move the Kinect down—empirical data shows that it does not need to be placed very high to get useful readings
3. Elevate the base (by using bigger wheels): I’ve had troubles getting over bumps due to low ground clearance
4. Change microcontrollers from an ATMega328P to a ATMega2560
5. Add an LCD for quick feedback on important things like battery voltage and motor speed

Source code is available for download—there’s a Git repository at tpmo.im/robot.git.

git clone git://tpmo.im/robot.git

Alternatively, browse the repository over the internet here

Pictures:

Replaced the computer and moved the kinect. It's a lot smaller now!

So I finally got around to taking some pics of the robot (as it is now):

In the course of making a to-be-revealed robot, I’ve encountered problems with various FTDI cables (and their attached peripherals) being automatically mounted in different locations, depending on the order in which they were inserted and initialized. For obvious reasons, this poses an issue – the IMU cable won’t work well with motor commands, and the actuator controller doesn’t give any IMU data.

After some thinking, I decided to solve the problem via udev mounting (somewhat hackish). In Linux, udev controls the mounting of various hardware peripherals to mountpoints in the file system. This tutorial is written for Ubuntu 10.10, but could easily be translated to any distribution of Linux (and probably Mac OS X, as well).

Some pictures (nothing more, atm).