Robotics in the Curriculum

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

All fools day it may have been ... but not at the Open University headquarters today in Milton Keynes. The 'Robotics in the Curriculum' event was attended by a variety of people from the commercial and education worlds. Looking for ways to develop the use of robotics in education, ...

Sensor alignment

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 ...

Tyre stretcher

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 ...

New tyres

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 ...

Encoder/Motor trouble

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 ...

Tyres and traction

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 ...

Decimus performance graphs

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 ...

Decimus doing circuits

Saturday, March 22nd, 2008

After a bit of a break, I have done some more work on Decimus, my DC micromouse. With all the peripherals tested and working, I have been concentrating on the motion controller or profiler. This has turned out to be harder than I expected. The basic idea is simple ...