Now why would you do THAT?

Life is much easier when you can see what's going on Sometimes I think these machines are getting a little too autonomous for my liking... Right now, Auric is being a downright pain the in the rear.  It just seems to be uncooperative. It all started when I observed that the directional control was erratic.  Given that the steering process is a stream of adjustments based on image processing, it is normal that there will usually be a mismatch in the speeds of the motors on each side.  But when the camera is shown a static image of a receding path I would expect it to steer more or less straight, or to make only small adjustments.  This however, was not the case. More digging hinted that not all of the commands sent from the main controller to the motor controller were being processed.  This boiled down to one of three possibilities: The main controller was not sending the commands; The motor controller was not receiving all the commands being se...

I love building robots.   They are a great test of your creativity and problem-solving skills.  They are also a good way to introduce kids to electronics and software. These days they are also very inexpensive to get started with, thanks to Arduino and low-cost modules.  Even if you don't know how to solder, chances are you could build the machine I describe here in an afternoon. What is it? It's been named "The Meerkat".  If you watch the accompanying video it's not hard to see how the kids named it. This is a 4-wheel machine which uses sonar to detect and avoid obstacles.  To make life a little more interesting, the ultrasonic modules is steered using a small servo motor.  This allows the machine to more effectively find a clear path. The Design At the heart of the robot is an Arduino Mega2560.  This board has all of the I/O we need and is programmed with the Arduino IDE application. The Arduino board cannot drive the mot...