Piece of Mind

I just spent about 20 hours last week reading up on robotics, when I should be doing… many other more important things.

Mostly from this site -
http://www.societyofrobots.com/

They explain things assuming you have no electrical knowledge at all (I have almost half a degree! =P), so it was a pretty easy read. Still very interesting concepts, though. Surprising how simple some of the algorithms are that will allow you to do very cool things.

I’m not sure how I found it, but it’s amazing. It’s like… a whole new world for me =P

I think I just found myself a project for this 2 weeks break – a 2 wheels (differential drive) robot that does something simple. Following shadows or something.

Went on a shopping spree and ordered probably way more things than I will ever need… $150 worth of resistors, capacitors, transistors, regulators, random chips, etc. servo motors (4!), photoresistors, phototransistors, infrared LEDs (for making an encoder), an IR range finder (from ebay!), a bunch of sensors, a microcontroller board (Arduino Duemilanove, amazing stuff. why build my own if I can get an Aruduino for $30 =P), and a huge NiMH battery pack.

Let’s see how this will turn out…

Most of the things have arrived already (from digikey). Still waiting for the servos. Played with the microcontroller board quite a bit. They make it too easy =P digitalWrite(), digitalRead()… I almost lost hope in microcontrollers after the crazy PIP project (all assembly).

It’s a strange feeling. I’m usually a software guy, but this stuff attracted me like nothing ever did before. Maybe it’s what I really want to do. Maybe I’ll even switch to electrical :O.

Hope I didn’t just dump a huge amount of money in for nothing =P. At least now I have my own stock of electronic components. Took me 2 hours to sort everything… and I somehow forgot to order wires. Guess I’ll be stealing some from school =P.

Artistic talents much?

The aftermath

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 2:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.