Bit ambitious as a first project, but I have 'some' background in programing.
Right now I am a student at University of Idaho. I am taking C++ and attend the ACM meetings. ACM is a group on campus that does programing challenges and is now dabling in robotics. They recently got an Arduino board, and it is my understanding that it uses C++.
This will be my first robot, except for a semester in high school where I programed a robot to navigate a maze using only a sequence of commands.
Am I better off getting an Arduino board to learn on, than a Picaxe 28x1? or stick with the reccomended hardware for the YDM? I do no plan to scavenge the bot for parts later, I would buy all new for my second bot.
Also, I have sourced all parts for the YDM from solarbotics.com except the sampler board! It would cost me nearly $40 USD to get one from the source provided. Does any one know of something availible in the US that could be used? (within reason and budget! :p )
I think I would build my bot with the slower GM3 like the YDM II, instead of the GM9 on the original. I figured out what they were using by watching the video's, the original YDM is faster!
I also would like to put a downward looking IR sensor to detect cliffs if the Picaxe would have support for it. (looking at its specs, it has plenty of pins for extra goodies)
Anyway! looking forward to bot building and programing.
Man! You must have a defective board Man! You must have a defective board because if mine ever played “marry had a little lamb”, I would make it surely defective by busting it up and trashing it. That’s Guaranteed Defective Now…
CAT5 wire works for just CAT5 wire works for just about anything that doesn’t need more than a few amps. Servos don’t need a seperate power supply, but they do usually need a solid 4.8-6V and not too much noise (a capacitor or two usually fixes that anyway).
• You can drive the pager motors from the darlington IC, but only in one direction. You can use two channels from the darlington + 2 extra transistors to create an H-bridge to drive the motor both ways, but you may find it easier to just make a seperate H-bridge or buy a motor driver IC.
• The servo signal can be passed through the darlington, but you’ll need to add an extra pull-up resistor, and the servo signal will have to be inverted somewhere either in the code, electronically between the PICAXE and the darlington, or between the darlington and the servo.
What type of speaker are you using? A coil speaker can be driven by the darlington, whereas a piezo speaker is better driven directly from one of the PICAXE digital outputs.
