Alright!
So I'm really new here obviously, and I have made a few forum posts and bot page comments but I haven't actually introduced myself or mentioned any projects I've got going on. My name's Patrick, and I hail from a northern Ontario town called Sudbury. I'm currently in my third year of a Computer Science degree after having spent a bit in the Electronics Engineering Technician program at the local community college and having worked a bit in Toronto for a while.
I'm going to start this blog to post updates and keep track of my brand spankin' new project which also happens to be my Thesis project for the upcoming term. I'm still working on getting a supervisor for the project and to finalize the details, but it's essentially going to be applying spacial sense and artificial intelligence to some relatively simple robots. These are two fields I'm very interested in, but (especially the AI) haven't had much chance to learn theory let alone apply it to a working model.
I guess I can start with an update, since I do have the chassis for on of the robots complete. No pictures here, since I'm using the Tamiya track chassis and a dual gearbox for the motivators, and I'm pretty sure everybody and their grandmother here knows what those looks like. I'll be using an 18f452 PIC chip on each bot which will have one of the AI states programmed in (obstacle avoidance and lazy search pattern). Other states will come from the PC which will be running the rest of the show. I'll have some finer details here possibly tomorrow, as I've got a meeting with some profs to hopefully finialize the project.
Sorry for the long-winded post!
Patrick
Do you use the firmware on it? or do you do code in assembly?