Zaethira Update.

I've made a lot of progress in the past few weeks on my Robot. It had remained dormant for a few months, but I decided to take some time for a context switch to one of my favorite projects. I've got probably 80% of the physical structure built. And the software is probably about 50% done. And the software side of things has made leaps and bounds.

Here's an updated color-coded architecture diagram. I've decided to drop the speaker output feature, mainly because I'm not sure what I'd do with it, but I may resurrect the idea.

Compare to my original chart here

I've got the Pawn scripting working pretty well, I've got some of my low level functionality exposed as Pawn API's, and I've adapted the Chibi/OS shell to treat Pawn bytecode files as "executables" that I can optionally launch in a background thread.

I could probably fill 20 pages with all the developments, but I'm not going to, I just spared myself enough time for a brief post.

Here's a video showing a script running that tries to navigate a square. The compass and and encoder readings are queried in the script to detect 90 degree turns and half meter movements. The compass code is probably beta level, and I'd call the encoder tracking alpha level, so that's why the square is somewhat off. Eventually, I'll have more elaborate geo-spatial reckoning, so that I'll simply command the robot to "go to coordinate x,y, and it will figure out how to get the from the current position(avoiding obstacles too of course). I hope this comes out, Blogger doesn't seem to have an easy way to preview video before publishing a post.

I can also control it manually via IR remote controller from a cheap IR helo.


Fun times.

--P

Zaethira Progress.

I've been doing a lot lately. Often, when I've had a choice between posting something, and working on something, I've chosen the latter. I noticed recently that I missed the month of November entirely, my bad! To top it off, my last post was a bit of a crotchety vent about haters, and we all know haters are gonna hate.

I've been working a lot on my robot autonomous vehicle, Zaethera. I've also got a ton of other projects in various stages of planning, that I'm keeping mum about for now.

In my last post, I posted a color-coded high level view of the architecture. There's a lot more green now, I'll post an updated chart in my next post. I don't think I dropped any subsystem from the original, and much of the left-hand side is built assembled, and ~50% coded.

I'm beginning to enjoy this electronics hobby thing.
The parts in the Sparkfun box in the back are the rear/side
IR proximity sensors, and the compass module. Near the top,
on the red, black, and blue wires is the IR remote control receiver.

Robot update.

I haven't posted in a while. The lulls usually happen when I'm busy. I've failed you, my adoring fans, and for that I blame... um squirrels..

I have been happily jamming away for the past couple months on my robot, Zaethira. (Which is a concatenation of my kids' and wife's names, and happens to sound geek awesome, the geekiness of the whole is greater than the geek sum of the parts).

Anyway, I could have written a 20 page blog post about how things are coming along, but I think a diagram does a much better job. I made the below because I needed to get a handle on where I needed to focus and what I planned to do. This diagram made me realize how flipping complex this project is.