Off-season project ideas?

[Mike]

Originally Posted by Bongle

That's really all the materials he needs for a basic one. The coding portion will probably be difficult, but he shouldn't physically need anything more to make a low-speed reckoning system. All I meant is that he doesn't need a working robot or lots of space to test this basic one. But nobody cares about a programmer's pain, so to a non-programmer team-leader, that IS how easy it is. You drop it off, and come back a month later and hopefully he did it.

Just realized I totally forgot about wheel-turn counters. You can use them too (in fact, they're much better since they aren't measuring the 2nd derivative of your location). But you'd still only need a rolling robot chassis, not a powered robot or lots of space for that.

Yeah, thats all the materials he needs, but hes gonna need a co-processor if you plan on doing anything cpu intensive while also performing thousands of analog to digital conversions and interrupts. Then you need serial port code, you have to design a data packet, and fix hundreds of small nuances and bugs that you can't even begin to imagine. Also, a month? I'd estimate it at three, and thats working on it every single day for 5-6 hours. Try balancing 40 hour work weeks, plus high school, plus this. My partner and I are currently approaching the year-point-five mark.

Wheel counters are good when you are designing the system solely for your robot chassis, but when you want it to be easily accessible to hundreds of other possible variations you're going to want to go purely inertial. Then you can have fun accounting for drift.

All said and done a navigation system is one hell of a project, as well as a learning experience. I want to work on mine some more