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My First Robot

Some people (like my brother) have seen the robots on TV (Battlebots, etc.) and have suddenly gotten a 'bug' to build a robot. Not me. I've been putting off building a robot for years now. But that all changed when my brother pointed me towards the Robothon robotics competition (www.robothon.com) held in Seattle every year. Time to get building....

I rarely endorse or recommend books/companies. But I am going to make huge concessions in this tutorial.

If you want to know the nitty gritty 'how to' of robotics, take a look at Dave Cook's book Intermediate Robot Building.

If you need a quick and easy chassis, checkout Pololu's disc chassis with gear boxes and truck tires.

Get to it!:

Page 1 : Main Page
Page 2 : Assembling the Chassis
Page 3 : Soldering the Motors
Page 4 : PWMing via Timer2 ISR
Page 5 : Final PCB Bot

Schematics: Main board, Motor Controller

Source code: Motor control (C, ASM, HEX)

This tutorial will shoot you through the basics of assembling a Dirty Bot: a small robot controlled by a PIC 16F88 using a Pololu chassis and Pulse Width Modulation techniques to control the motor speeds.

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Comments

3 comments


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TheTrustedOne's rank:
–0.33
|   November 30, 2008 at 9:52 PM
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Just curious as to why you chose a pic uC when most seem to be going to AtMega chips?
by Nate is a SparkFun employee
|   December  3, 2008 at 9:50 AM
PICs are what I first used/learned. The 16F84A was expensive, and painful to program, but that's what all the tutorials and books referred to circa 2002. I've since started drinking the Atmel koolaid and very much like the ATmega line.
TheTrustedOne's rank:
–0.33
|   December  6, 2008 at 11:27 AM
Comment rating:
0
Ant chance you would have some samples or tutorial for the AtMega168 for our little friend here?

I have ordered all the parts and am intending to use the AtMega168 and a 2.4 MhZ wireless cam to build a security drone.

Also I would love to publish a tutorial here if that is at all possible.

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