Chippu has now upgraded its hardware, and is now much smarter. The Atmega32 is replaced by a more powerful and feature rich Atmega128 based Wiring Board. It has 53 I/O pins, 8 analog inputs, 2 hardware serial ports, 6 PWM (analog outputs), SPI, TWI, 8 external interrupts pins. Also it can drive a maximum of 24 servo motors. Quite impressive. A motor control board based on L293D was also added. Here are a few shots.
I was using an Atmega32 based Arduino clone for the low level hardware control of my personal robot Chippu. But soon ran into problems as the code size increased and the inbuilt RAM of 2kb overflowed often, and it caused the ROS node running on Arduino to go out of sync. Also I needed to drive about 16 servo motors , and my Arduino permitted only a maximum of 12. So the only alternative was to go for a powerful Arduino Mega 2560.
Wiring Board V1.0
Really you won’t look back if you jump into the world of open source robotics using ROS. The main advantage is that you will not end up re-inventing the wheel. While ROS is used in many research laboratories and universities, you don’t have to be an academic to use it. The installation instructions of ROS are here and they are pretty straightforward. Once installed and set up, it is time to rock. The basic tutorials about the ROS filesystem,terminology, etc will do very good.
Arduino IDE is designed to program Arduino boards featuring an AVR microcontroller with an Arduino bootloader. But Do you know that the same Arduino IDE can be used to program other Atmega microcontrollers, even without a bootloader?.
Arduino Mega
I got a pair of old robot controller boards based on 8051. It could drive four DC motors through its two L293 H-Bridge drivers, a 16×2 character LCD, an RS232 port and plenty of IO pins.But it was based on an old 8051, and that could be the reason that someone discarded this board in a junkyard.
Robot Controller Board
