And dangerous at the same time don’t you think? 
not to the guy behind the gun 
My god! There crazy!
Anyway, I would recommend building a nice big rover. Get some large and very high wheel ad make a nice aluminium/lexan chasis insert all the sensors you need behind the lexan ( ). Maybe leave a little hole to let pass the LED lights.
It’s a nice project!
Scares me to think someone has to do this to protect his privacy.
Generally in the US, if you do something that is publically viewable (on or off your own property, then it is not considered private. A better approach might be to plant a bamboo hedge/screen a couple of feet back from the fence that would block the direct view from house to house.
Thanks for the suggestions. We are up on a hillside, where their house is about 150’ higher than ours and are probably about 900 feet away as the crow filies. That is one of the reasons I am planting so many trees, including some willows which grow very tall reasonably quickly, along with Douglas fir, Cedar, Pines, … So far I have not found any nearby cameras so this part may not turn out to be a major issue.
I wish we could simply go up with cookies to try to resolve things but I don’t think they would let us through their electronic gates…
But now back to designing something. From what I am hearing it sounds like I probably should build something larger than the standard 4wd, probably something similar to one of evolutions designs, or maybe built off of a monster RC truck. I probably try to take some time over the next several days to try to come up with a strawman set of requirements and design and see where it takes me.
An alternative design to a 4wd robot that looks interesting to me is a multiple track system, like the iRobot Packbot. I wonder how hard that would be to do?
Kurt
I believe Grant Imahara from Mythbusters did something similar to what you are describing with the Vex track kit. Might be worth your while to check it out.
Get the Tritrack kit from Lynxmotion, and use a stronger chassis. The tracks in that kit are better than just about anything I’ve seen in the price range, and are quite capable of rough terrain.
- Jon
You’ll deffinately want to use the 3" tracks, more track touching the ground will give better traction and spread the weight of the bot so it dossen’t sink in the snow during the winter months. Wider tracks will also make it much harder to tip over if your worried about those pot holes.
I have them and love them (except when driving on smooth surfaces). They’re the best for the roughest terrain, I promise! 8)
My video rover is probably a bit smaller than the 4WD platform. It’s 12" wide (with tires) and 12" long. About 4" high (8"with the camera). If you need something ready to run and complete with the video integrated into the remote and rover it would be a good bet. But if you are into building yourself, which it seems like you are, the lynx 4WD platform would probably be your best bet. A small rover like the 4WD platform is very versatile and difficult to get stuck.
If you really want to build it yourself, you can use a R/C truck for a platform, like the E-maxx or E-savage, and mount your pan/tilt camera and video transmitter to that.
If you are looking for video transmission over 300 feet reliably, a conventional 2.4Ghz wireless camera won’t do it. You will have to look into Yagi antennas, high Watt systems or 900mHz links. Same with the control. R/c will only get you so far.
I can’t help but worry that all those electric fences are going to emit a horrible amount of interference. Dependant on if they are constantly energized, have pulses of electricity, and the level of voltage and current.
Sounds like an interesting project.
Thanks, so far I thinking in two different directions. Maybe do as evolution suggested and start off 4wd platform, but the track system looks interesting as well.
If I went with tritrack with 3" track, it looks like I would need to buy the 2" kit and then buy the 3" track plus idlers, plus spacers.
One thought would be to combine to two platforms and come up with a 4 track platform, like what the Mythbuster guys did with the VEX system, but with tritracks. Not sure how easy it would be to build the body to allow for the front tracks to rotate to different angles to crawl over things, but this could be a lot of fun.
Its amazing how complicated you can make it just to annoy the neighbors.
I’m now starting to understand why the people decided to put up the electric fence. Good fences make for good neighbors.
Right!.. The neighbors are robotaphobic. lol
I took evolutions suggestions and ordered the 4wd kit to start experimenting with. This week most of our driveway was covered with a new layer of rock (railroad ballast), which should give the rover a good test. I still would like to someday some experimenting with a track based system, but I probably will want to model it first… Which implies I need to start learning a 3d modelling program!
I also ordered a camera from supercircuits, to see how well that works
Thanks everyone
You won’t be disappointed. The 4WD kit is a great platform to build off of.
How’s it coming kurte?
Doing Ok, I built it and run it around with the Laser 6 remote and I receive video back with the boostervision camera. I have not run it much yet outside as most days have been reasonably wet outside and those days that are not, we have contractors running around.
I ordered stuff like an Atom Pro and a bunch of cables and the like for phase 2 (delivery scheduled for Friday), where I now would like to make it run autonomous, but with information from the remote.
Step 1 is to plug all 6 channels from the RC receiver into the pro and decode the signals and in some cases just pass them on through. Maybe depending on the status of the landing gear switch. I believe I have read a few threads where others are doing similar things.
I will also be adding on the gripper plus sensors (some IR, some I2C (SRF08 SRF10 CMP10), encoder input, +++) and an LCD. I am not sure yet if the Atom Pro will be able to handle all of this (both I/O pin wise and horsepower), but I will start off with 1. I may use my spair SSC32 to offload the servos and whatever else makes sense. Or I may add on a second processor board. Not sure yet, but at least I will have some fun things to try out.
So far the voltage regulator appears to be working out fine for getting 6v from the 12vs (two 2800mah 6v batteries in series). Not sure yet what the best way to charge this. Currently I unscrew the top, disconnect each battery and use the 6v green charger. It would be nice to hook up some external jacks and simply plug in the 12v blue charger and charge them all at once.
Now back to checking up on the contractor…
Minor update. I have been playing around with the trying to have the Atom Pro trying to reliably intercepting the PWM signals from the Hitec receiver. My first attempt looked like:
[code]Variable declaration
PULSE_SLOP con 10 ; try to define some slop in pulse size so dont just flop back and forth
lPulse var long(6)
LPulseT var long
lPulsePrev var long(6)
bChannel var byte
bChannelMask var byte
pass var byte
PulseChanged var byte
TCNTStart var word(6)
…
;============================== Start of CODE ================================================
; Initialization code
gosub LCD_Init
;Interrupt init
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_0,handle_intp0
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_1,handle_intp1
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_2,handle_intp2
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_3,handle_intp3
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_4,handle_intp4
ONINTERRUPT WKPINT_5,handle_intp5
PMR5.bit0 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
PMR5.bit1 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
PMR5.bit2 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
PMR5.bit3 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
PMR5.bit4 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
PMR5.bit5 = 1 ;enables pin as WKP interrupt instead of normal I/O
IEGR2.bit0 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
IEGR2.bit1 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
IEGR2.bit2 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
IEGR2.bit3 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
IEGR2.bit4 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
IEGR2.bit5 = 0 ;0 = Pin will interrupt on a falling edge, 1 to interrupt on a rising edge.
; TimerW regs
TCRW.bit5 = 1 ;TIMERW counts on clk/8
TCRW.bit4 = 1 ;TIMERW counts on clk/8
TCRW.bit7 = 0 ;TCNT free running counter
TMRW.bit7 = 1 ;TCNT free running counter
pass = 0
PulseChanged = 0
ENABLE WKPINT_0
ENABLE WKPINT_1
ENABLE WKPINT_2
ENABLE WKPINT_3
ENABLE WKPINT_4
ENABLE WKPINT_5
LCD_String = “PWM Intercept”, 0
gosub LCD_Print[1, 0]
;================================ Main Loop =================================================
main_loop
; I wish I had some semaphores!
if PulseChanged then
DISABLE WKPINT_0
DISABLE WKPINT_1
DISABLE WKPINT_2
DISABLE WKPINT_3
DISABLE WKPINT_4
DISABLE WKPINT_5
gosub LCD_SetPos[0, 1]
for i = 0 to 5
if i = 3 then
gosub LCD_SetPos[0, 2]
endif
gosub LCDConvertNumToString[lPulse(i)]
gosub LCD_Print[0,0]
LCD_STRING = " ",0
gosub LCD_PRINT[0,0]
next
PulseChanged = 0
ENABLE WKPINT_0
ENABLE WKPINT_1
ENABLE WKPINT_2
ENABLE WKPINT_3
ENABLE WKPINT_4
ENABLE WKPINT_5
pause 500
endif
goto main_loop
'============================================================================================
’
’ Handle interrupts for each of the channels
handle_intp0
bChannel = 0
goto HandleChannel
handle_intp1
bChannel = 1
goto HandleChannel
handle_intp2
bChannel = 2
goto handleChannel
handle_intp3
bChannel = 3
goto handleChannel
handle_intp4
bChannel = 4
goto handleChannel
handle_intp5
bChannel = 5
goto handleChannel
HandleChannel
bChannelMask = 1 << bChannel
If (pass & bChannelMask) = 0 then
' Handle rare case of multiple channels active same time, by only resetting TCNT if we are the only channel...
if pass = 0 then
TCNT = 0
endif
TCNTStart(bChannel) = TCNT
IEGR2 = IEGR2 & ~bChannelMask ' interrupt on falling edge
pass = pass | bChannelMask
else
lPulseT = (TCNT - TCNTStart(bChannel))/2 ; divide by 2 to obtain us
if ((lpulseT + PULSE_SLOP) < lPulse(bChannel)) or ((lPulseT - PULSE_SLOP) > lPulse(bChannel)) then
lPulse(bChannel) = lpulseT
PulseChanged = 1
endif
IEGR2 = IEGR2 | bChannelMask 'interrupt on a rising edge
pass = pass & ~bChannelMask
endif
Resume
…[/code]
I do get the interrupts properly and calculate numbers. I believe that the first channel comes in accurately, but the others timings are off as I believe the ammount of time I spend processing the falling edge of one channel delays the processing of the raising edge of the next one and so the timing is to short. I looked at the 6 channels using the Parallax USB Oscilloscope and it looks like the 6 channels are each output sequentially, starting with CH1. It looks like CH2 might go high just before CH1 goes low, but could be same time. After CH6 goes low their is a delay until the cycle is repeated. (Each cycle is something like 20ms).
For my next attempt I will assume that channels are sequential and on rising edge of CH1 I will reset the TCNT to zero and then wait for the falling edge of all 6 channels and simply save away TCNT difference from one channel to the next. I may also have the code do most of its processing in the dead time after CH6.
Anyone have any other suggestions?
…as LATE as my reply is i think this is a great option…over at e-savage.com we are working on this right now…Hate loosing this big BomBot contract out to TRAXXAS when HPI has EXACTLY what one might want…
…The E-savage is a PERFECT platform for this sort of thing and nowhere NEAR as ‘delicate’ as a rover…
Sorry but an e-savage and an e-maxx are much more delicate than any one of my rovers. Not only can you drop the standard ones off a building but they also come in bulletproof versions. And that’s real bullet-proof not a figure of speech.