progress

Finally put the mechanical assembly on hold and started to work on the electronics. No photos today, just a list of accomplishments:

• Built a 12, 9 and 5 volt power supply, so I don't need to mess with batteries during the development process.


• Assembled a TTL-to-RS232 serial conversion cable, which didn't work.


• Ordered a preassembled TTL-to-RS232 serial conversion cable.


• Figured out why my original cable wasn't working (thanks to a helpful member of the Society Of Robots forum, the same day as the preassembled cable arrived.


• Booted the microcontroller for the first time, wrote a quick test program, and watched a little red LED successfully blink on and off! Thrilling!


• Grabbed the wonderful Orangutan-Lib code library, which is a great assistance in writing communications code for the microcontroller.


• Got the I2C comms routines up and running, and successfully communicated with the servo controller. I watched my first servo move! Thrilling!


• After a few tries, got a working serial communications link from the microcontroller to the laptop. Now I have the infrastructure to interface the puny robot brain with the heavy-duty processing power of a full-scale PC. (This will eventually be replaced with a wireless data link of some kind, but wired is fine for now.)


• Interfaced (via I2C) with the newly-arrived speech synthesiser. Heard my robot speak his first words! (Yes, also thrilling!)


• Interfaced (via ADC) with the sonar module (robot's left eye, in the photo from the previous post). Did some back-of-the-napkin math to convert a voltage reading to a distance, and determined that the overhead light is 44 inches from the surface of the table! Woot!


• Interfaced (via ADC) with the 3-axis accelerometer, watched the numbers change as I tilted it. Less thrilling, but important for the robot's sense of balance.


• Mixed up some wires and hooked the 9-volt power supply to the 5-volt input of the camera. Bad. Ordered a new camera.


• Obtained a nice USB video-capture device and began writing video-processing code utilising the OpenCV computer vision library. Waiting for new camera to arrive to test it.

I'm at the point where I have wires strewn about in 50 different directions, so it's time to make some proper connection cables for each device.

Look for a complete parts-list in an upcoming post. Also, perhaps a name-my-robot survey.