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Thought 37: The ARM of COG

Finally decided that the robots current name is Cog. I was debating this because of all of the other Cogs out there, but finally decided that because of the steam punk influence in design that it would be a fitting name.

Progress so far on Cog:

Constructed that ARM kit:


It runs on 5 3V DC motors. Which is fine, I have something to play with for figuring out the mechanic. In the mean time, I am attempting to wire to an older version of a IO control board we make at work to control the motors. May need to add some relays to make it work, and will be using 5V instead of 3V, but the motors should be fine.

Wii Mote:
Utilized GlovePIE and PPJoy to create joystick control for the left and right motors. The current software works perfectly, but needs to be scripted a bit and need to update the hardware to make some of the debugging a little easier. There is a needed box re-design coming anyway. It is fun to drive around and I need to post a video of it, but I want to post both a video OF it and video FROM it, because that would be cool.

Sensors:
Working on sensors, currently have 2 sonar, 2 IR, and 2 web cams. Current thinking the web cams are a bit dated, but they were cheap and a good place to start. Again working on the old IO controller, it was designed for PoE (48V) and Ethernet, but had a serial port. Basically just rewriting the code use the serial port as command port instead of the Ethernet, and modifying the power to use 12V from the battery. That and it was a prototype and has a few board errors. They have been corrected, but still makes a bit wary of it being fully functional. Of course that's better than it collecting dust.

Oh, and never call a robot 'our baby' to your wife, it just might freak her out a bit.

That's the update for now, more pictures, updates, and video to follow.
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