Holy Wii Batman!

[falconmaster]

Here is a robot project we are working with Intel and ASU to develop. It will eventually be a roaming autonomous robot.

The student was working on code during the break
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fikM6S7cSPE

[nighterfighter]

That is really cool!

How were you able to get communication from the Wii Remote?

[RoboMaster]

Wow, that really is cool. Mecanum wheels are always great.

@nighterfighter: There are ways to interface NI hardware/software with the Wii, a couple of people have done it. Most notably this guy:
http://decibel.ni.com/content/docs/DOC-2326

The Wii sends out a Bluetooth signal, so if you can sense that and figure it out, you're good to go. I'm sure there's a whole slew of resources out there for people who want to do so.

[kE7JLM]

We actually did not use any FIRST hardware. We used Phidget Motor Speed Controllers - http://www.phidgets.com/products.php...roduct_id=1064 - and yeah they can only do 10amps continuous...

But they are really cool in sense that they connect to a regular computer via USB. and the code is really intuitive looks like this -

                if (ws.ButtonState.Two == true)
                {
                    leftmotorcontrol.motors[0].Velocity = -100 * (ws.AccelState.Values.X - ws.AccelState.Values.Y + turn); // front left
                    leftmotorcontrol.motors[1].Velocity = -100 * (ws.AccelState.Values.X + ws.AccelState.Values.Y + turn); // rear left
                    rightmotorcontrol.motors[0].Velocity = 100 *(ws.AccelState.Values.X + ws.AccelState.Values.Y - turn); // front right
                    rightmotorcontrol.motors[1].Velocity = 100 * (ws.AccelState.Values.X - ws.AccelState.Values.Y - turn); // rear right
                }
                else
                {
                    leftmotor.motors[0].Velocity = 0.00;
                    leftmotor.motors[1].Velocity = 0.00;
                    rightmotor.motors[0].Velocity = 0.00;
                    rightmotor.motors[1].Velocity = 0.00;
                }

This is the heart of the mechnaum drive system, kinda simple... Just adding up all the victors...

As for the Wiimote I used the wiimotelib. Here is some nice open scr code and a the dll download - http://www.codeplex.com/WiimoteLib

I did all the coding in C# using Microsoft C# IDE...

The little black box on top of the bot is a fitpc2 - http://fit-pc2.com/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page, yet another very nice piece of hardware

And to top it all off the entire bot with Ultra sonic sensor a Digital/Analog IO board, motor speed controllers, frame/wheel/hardware, and cpu was under 2k,a very attractive price in my opinion.


Extra info -----

Auto Programming and better video coming soon...

Here is our wheel config -

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