Fred, an Internet-controlled robot

Let's Make Robots Robots
1

Hello LMR! My name is Jordan, I'm in grade 12 in Canada, and this is my robot Fred.

I won't say he's my first robot. I've built my share of line followers and sumobots over the last couple of years and dabbled in radio controlled manipulators like any geek worth his salt. Fred (and his considerable support system) is the first project I feel good enough to show off a bit!

The inspiration for Fred came from an old hackaday post featuring this website which speaks for itself. I did some reading on wireless data links, Apache servers, HTML, and PHP. One Solarbotics order later my friends are making the thing do the tango on my kitchen floor.

The supporting hardware for running Fred includes a video capture device and a second XBee module connected to an old donated laptop running an Apache server with a PHP script in an iframe. The server is open most of the time for anybody to read more about or drive the robot and can be found here. I apologize in advance for my terribly crappy upstream connection.

I would appreciate any constructive feedback and would be happy to answer any questions :)

Let you explore my basement wirelessly.

  • Actuators / output devices: Tamiya gearbox / tracks, analog video Tx, pan servo
  • Control method: Wireless, by internet clients or other PC software
  • CPU: Solarbotics Ardweeny (Arduino clone)
  • Operating system: Arduino bootloader
  • Power source: 2x 9.6v 1Ah NiCd packs
  • Programming language: Arduino, PHP, HTML
  • Sensors / input devices: XBee PRO, BittyBot 2-way IR, mini analog camera
  • Target environment: indoor
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/fred-an-internet-controlled-robot-1
2

Great job bud. Just drove

Great job bud. Just drove the thing around and it’s pretty awsome (think I saw your leg too) :slight_smile: Would be nice to see some code or schematics !

3

Done.

Link to source code posted on website. Maybe I’ll draw something tomorrow.

4

It’s very nice :smiley: I like it.

It’s very nice :smiley: I like it. I send you a email, so please read it :slight_smile:

5

camera

Im curious about something on your robot.

Does the camera stream only jpeg images or it can also stream video ?

Can the ardweeny handle video processing or you use something extra?

6

Great effort ! I just moved

Great effort ! I just moved it around a bit :slight_smile: I certainly did not like the driving interface :stuck_out_tongue:

Keep up the good work !

7

Agreed

Neither do I, to be perfectly honest. Realtime buttons would be nice, but I’m not sure how to code that in PHP. Not to mention the high latency of the video stream would probably create more crashes that way than there are already. :stuck_out_tongue:

Of course, if anyone has practical suggestions I’m all ears :slight_smile:

8

Pretty cool

Nice setup.

9

Cool robot. I like it. But

Cool robot. I like it. But when I tried to drive it the camera screen had a lot of black-white noise. Maybe it just was turned of.