- Home
-
Past Projects
Found Footage: My old Robots
In 2010 I found some old footage of a couple of robots I built, to varying degrees of completeness. One was a development platform I was going to use and the other was a small Line Following Robot built from CDs and PIC micro-controllers.
The development platform was called M.U.P.P.E.T (it sounded cool back then), which stood for something like Multi Use Programmable Platform and Extendable Technology. This was powered by two 12v SLA batteries, controlled by custom built H-Bridges and PIC processors again. The first version didn't have any sensors or controllability and was simply programmed with a set of instructions into the PIC and off it went. I later started adding a Micro PC with sensors, but other projects took over.
LFR1 (Line Following Robot: 1) was PIC processor based, had two LEDs and Photo-Diodes for sensing the difference between light and dark on the floor. The coding was done with the Microchips IDE (available to download). It worked to an extent, but was not very tolerant of the edges of the line, so would bounce back and forwards as it detected the line and then when it lost it again. The code wasn't overly complicated, hindered by the burning of the code on to chip each time you wanted to test a new version.
I built this robot using CDs as the platforms (top, middle and bottom) and plastic standoffs to space them out. This was pretty rigid and worked fantastically. I can't remember what the motors or gearboxes were, but they were just the little plastic gearboxes you could configure to whatever gear ratio you wanted.
Both of these "robots" still exist, gathering dust in my workshop. I may dig them out for sh*ts and giggles in the future.