Archive for March, 2008
Friday, March 28th, 2008
For consistent results, the sensors on a micromouse need to be carefully aligned and then fixed in place. In a perfect world, the emitters would all have the same radiation pattern and would generate the same amount of illumination for a given current. Well, that is never going to ...
Posted in decimus, micromouse | No Comments »
Friday, March 28th, 2008
These new soft tyres are so soft that it is difficult to get them onto the wheels without stretching them way out of shape. No matter how hard I try, they still run unevenly. Some of that is due to the tyre itself but mostly it is just a ...
Posted in micromouse | No Comments »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
That was quick. One of the new sets of tyres just arrived. They are the PN racing 8 degree slicks. I ordered them 3 days ago from Kenon Hobby in the US. These tyres certainly are soft and sticky so I put a pair straight on the test rig ...
Posted in decimus, micromouse | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 25th, 2008
This micromouse thing is a bit tricky. I have not been happy with the accuracy of the results I have been getting with Decimus. Occasionally, a move is significantly shorter, or longer than intended. Looking at the code does not help - either the code is fine or I just ...
Posted in Hardware, decimus, micromouse | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
The National Space Centre is having a robot weekend in May this year: See robots from the TV series Robot Wars Compete in the battle arena Take part challenges to ...
Posted in News | No Comments »
Monday, March 24th, 2008
It is true, I am losing my grip. A while ago I posted a link to a Japanese site demonstrating the grip available from a particular micromouse. A common way of doing this is to lock the wheels and place the mouse on a tilting surface. As the slope ...
Posted in decimus, micromouse | No Comments »
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
In general the dsPIC is well blessed with peripherals. The dsPIC30F6015 I am using at the moment has two serial ports in addition to a couple of SPI ports and an I2C port. These UARTs seem pretty easy to use as well. Still, like other peripherals on the dsPIC, they ...
Posted in Microchip C30 | No Comments »
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008
Time to do some tuning of the motion control parameters in Decimus. First I wanted to get some idea of how it is behaving with the initial settings. I have added a simple flight recorder function. A 4 kB buffer can hold up to 2000 integers. These are placed in ...
Posted in decimus, micromouse | 1 Comment »
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