My Robot

2016-01-29

I've posted about robotics stuff before, but I never actually talked about the robot I was building. I haven't done robotics stuff lately, so I won't go into much detail, but I thought I should at least share this video of my robot that my dad took.

As you can see, it's basically just a slow remote-controlled car. Nothing fancy. Still, I'm kinda proud of it because I designed it myself, picked out all the parts, wrote the software, and even built the chassis out of wood.

One interesting part of the project was that I built the motor controller circuit myself. It was fun for me because I got to do a lot of soldering, which I haven't done much before (as you might be able to tell from the picture below).

Most of the code I wrote is just the "driver" for the Xbox 360 controller using the GHI USB library. Here are some links I found useful for interfacing with the controller:

It's not shown in the video, but I also added a small video camera and LCD screen. Being able to see from the perspective of the robot is pretty cool, but that's as far as I've taken it for now. I'd like to use the camera for some autonomous behavior, but I'm guessing my mainboard wouldn't really be powerful enough to do any real-time video processing.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about the robot for now. But here are a few more photos of the construction: