Thousands of manhours.
Four thousand, two hundred and thirteen lines of code.
Hundreds of new cuss words.
Two years.
Coming 2007.
Thousands of manhours.
Four thousand, two hundred and thirteen lines of code.
Hundreds of new cuss words.
Two years.
ehm…what is this?
Does look like a drive train to me…
Robot Balboa?
Imad
Sounds interesting, but I can’t help to chuckle when I look at the portal and this on the side… No More Teasers in 2007!
Looks like Mike got his navigation black box working. Lets see if its useful.
As a little side note:
All schematics, code, part numbers, EVERYTHING from this project will eventually be released. For under $300 and some basic technical know-how (eg: can you read an instruction manual?), a first year team will be able to implement a very accurate and effective…
Wait, what were we talking about again? 
Man, that is an exquisite box of Diet Pepsi.
Now, out with the details–judging from the picture and the poster, I assume it’s some software kung-fu (and world-class kung-fu at that, knowing 237’s track record with such things). Color me interested.
Is that what the extra board is.
From Mikes post it looks like he is using that board to read the values that would be send over the dashboard port. I assume he is parseing them and logging them to something a CF card maybe. You can then use that log in making your autonomous code. It looks very nice.
Alright! I can see two encoders; I imagine you coupled it with a gyro, maybe an accelerometer for wheel slip if you wanted to get really fancy (4 Thousand lines!?! Where does it all go!)? Maybe even a nice input system to easily code a coordinate autonomous, perhaps even on the fly?
If you are doing the black box as Tom stated, I’m impressed. I had started to think about it a couple years back, but never had the initiative or skill to code it. And I’m glad I didn’t try! Four thousand lines and change? Crazy, but awesome. Don’t feel pressured to release that baby, especially not this coming year. You deserve the exclusive right to an insane autonomous if you created it!
http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/9826/untitled2ug9.jpg
I think I should stop talking now 
Hey, I programmed that black box 
Actually Mike and I are working on this together, its a fun project and so far, its mostly operational, the RC is being a bit uncooperative though.
That’s an STK500 In-System Programmer and prototype board from Atmel, it’s the (temporary) home of our blackbox, which monitors the robot and sends a nice packetized burst of information to the RC with all kinds of useful info 
from tom’s comment i cant help to think what havoc this might bring upon with another “black box” like 195 had last year…
Sounds like fun! I’m glad to know there’ll be some impressive autonomous modes out there this coming year. We have to see the results you get from this next season, I hope it proves that sensors really can make such a huge difference.
We’ll try to give you a run for your money if we can.
I had never seen this or heard about it before until now. Honestly.
But this is the “exact, identical, ditto” IDEA that I had for this year.
But I am no where near where you guys are with it. I am currently working with external PICs and Visual C++ app programming.
Honestly, I have never seen or heard about this before today yet the idea started this summer. That picture is exactly what it was.
I dought, I will be able to get it done though.
Good luck to you guys.
I forgot I mentioned this project to Tom a while back, seems like the majority of the mystery is gone. Should’ve known not to trust him with stuff like this
Don’t think I’m gonna let you in on all the juicy stuff…
This is a joint effort between Matt Krass and I. The testbot and hardware is located at my house, but without him this project would’ve never advanced from an idea and sketch on paper. He provided a large amount of the technical information that I didn’t know prior to this project. Biggest learning experience of my life.
So heres a brief run-down.
- ATMega16
- STK500
- No dashboard port
- CF card? Don’t give me ideas…
- Havocs a nice word
*]$300 and an hour or two of work and you’re up and running
That is all
Looks good. I’m wondering how you’re going to get “Drive Forward 100 inches” to actually work on the robot hardware side. Some modular drive control functions on the IFI side, perhaps?
We did something similar last year, but it was all done on the IFI hardware. I like bringing it off of the RC though; we ran into some interrupt problems between the encoders, timers, and constant serial traffic between the RC and our LCD screen system.
Serial traffic alone is building up trouble, we’re overflowing buffers a lot, so we may have to minimize the amount of data available. I think the IFI serial port system just wants to make people cry
What kind of LCD system did you use? We’re looking in to adding that functionality, if its worthy of the extra wiring and code and presents a useful advantage.
We were able to tap into our available TTL serial port on the RC last year to drive a serial-driven LCD. It was a 4x20 character display, and was very useful for diagnostics and PID loop tuning. We could test the robot and use the screen as a pseudo terminal to test functions of the robot without a laptop.
We created a menu system which made configuring the robot like using a copy machine. You could use up and down buttons to change the menu options, and select/back to advance through the sub menus.
The real glory in our system was in the pocket PC based waypoint creator. Make the waypoints on the PPC, plug in the serial cable, and it automatically synced. Cool stuff.
Didn’t use a camera last year?
We were looking at using TTL port for simplicity in hardware (no level shifters) but we want to include a passthrough to make the camera an option alongside the black box.
No offense guys, I believe we implemented a very similar system last year[1219 Iron Eagles]. We implemented 6 sensors on our robot with a navigation system. We had ours hooked up to a tablet PC, so we select points on the tablet and the action to perform and it writes a code into C and loads into the robot. We created sectors in EEPROM so basically we can save like 6 to 9 different codes in EEPROM and than based on the binary switches [coded for example 001 - autonomous 1] we were able to change our autonomous. We didn’t find lot of success last year because our microcontroller broke in one of the game and so we had to literally re-design the control system. Hopefully we can use it this year
6 sensors? :ahh:
What type of off board processor were you guys using?(you mention microcontroller so I figured it was something other than IFI)