Thursday, December 31, 2009

L298 Motor Controller


L298 is a very famous H-Bridge IC for controlling DC/Stepper motors. It is essential for making wheel robots. If you plan to build a robot in year 2010, you should check this cool tutorial by PyroElectro. It teaches you all the important things to know about this motor controller and show you some samples codes.


Tutorial here: http://www.pyroelectro.com/tutorials/l298_control/index.html

Monday, December 28, 2009

Robovie-II Shopping Assistant.

We will be old sometimes later, and we may need help on shopping in super market. Japanese researchers show us the "Robovie-II", helping you to find what you want in the huge super market and also help you to carry the goods.

Monday, December 14, 2009

Wheels Robot Tutorial.

Making autonomous robot with wheels is one of hottest project in the electronic DIY list. I want to make one in the near future, and I found out a very good tutorial on wheels robot design. It covers the basic design of 2 wheels, 3 wheels and 4 wheels robot design, and also motors and basic mechanics. It is worth to read if you want to build one!



Small robots drive trains By Ibrahim Kamal

Thursday, December 10, 2009

The next level of illusion.

Sparkfun did a very cool project, using a robot and video projection to make a very awesome effect. The robot equipped Infrared LEDs moving around, while the IR camera is keep tracking the robot position and project the patterns in front of it.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Connecting Camera to your AVR (MCU)



The uCam (microCAM) produced by 4D systems, is the easiest to connect to your AVR or MCU. It is a camera module with JPEG compressor ASIC integrated, you can grep the JPEG data (image frame) via UART interface which available on most of the MCU. The simplicity of interfacing comes with a price:) it costs US$59. Let see the demo here:




Link:
http://www.4dsystems.com.au/prod.php?id=75

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Android on Beagleboard.


Recently, Moto announced the Android Media Platform (based on TI OMAP processor) which you can get started with Android. I looks good to me too, but no information on the pricing yet.

I tried the porting of Android on OMAP, which is called "rowboat" project. I followed the instructions there, you can build from scratch or simply download the binaries there. It works very well on my BeagleBoard. If you are interested in running Android on your beagleboard, I strongly recommend you to check this out:

Android for OMAP3 (rowboat)

A cool video showing the Android running on BeagleBoard:

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

School Girl Robot Dance

In robo-one international exhibition, a schoolgirl robot perform dancing, it is very cool, but I think it can be better!!