|
Written by Joshua Montgomery
|
|
Friday, 11 July 2008 20:10 |
|
Just an update on the WiFi robot. I have ordered the servo controller and Nick has the OS up and running. I guess I should come up with a build environment and get the PC client software started. Once I have a copy of Nick's CF, I can set up a build environment for the host/robot. I had a chance to have a look at the Wall-E builder's group out and they have a number of items up and running including the chasis below. I also noticed that Disney is putting out a Wall-E in Sept. that will have a lot of the features we want to add to ours. Their design makes the point that many of Wall-E's behaviors are going to have to be pre-set into the controller and operated as a button. I figure that the robot will need at least 8 channels of control if not 10 or 12. Here is a video of Disney's robot. |
|
|
Written by Nick Mucci
|
|
Wednesday, 09 July 2008 00:21 |
|
After meeting with Joshua and Jacob today, I was excited to start work on our robots. I have done work in robotics in the past, including working with a team for the TV show Battlebots, as well as projects involving the standard Foster-Miller TALON, Yamaha RMax, and several other unmanned aircraft systems. However, its been a little while since I've really done this from the ground up; hopefully I'm not too rusty. Every robot needs a "brain" of some sort. We are using a Soekris net4801 computer to run our first robot. Using a linux workstation, I downloaded, configured, and installed the latest stable release of Voyage Linux on a compact flash card. The installation script seemed to complain a little about the bootloader configuration not working right, but when I loaded the CF card in the Soekris computer, it booted up just fine and started talking to my network. That didn't seem so bad. From this pont forward I just used ssh to remotely connect to the Soekris board to set things up. The actual operating system didn't really need anything done other than having users added and passwords changed. Out of the box, it connected to my network over Ethernet automatically. While trying to get the wifi set up I ran into a few issues that turned out to be due to the fact that I simply forgot how the software (particularly the madwifi drivers) worked. Once I realized my mistake, I banged my head on my keyboard, got the wifi set up correctly, and called it a day. Not bad for a first day's work. I'm going to look into battery packs for the robot tomorrow. |
|
Written by Joshua Montgomery
|
|
Tuesday, 08 July 2008 16:01 |
 Today Nick, Jacob and I met to discuss the construction of a WiFi robot. The goal of the project is to demonstrate what you can do with a true wireless broadband connection. (i.e. WiFi not 3G, WiMAX or any of the other "wireless broadband")
We are going to build two robots that use the Freenet WiFi network to connect to their controllers. This means that the robots can be operated from anywhere in town using nothing but a WiFi enabled Laptop.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Opinion 
