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
I built a small robot to detect an object using image processing techniques and when the object is found, it goes near to it and picks it up.
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
It was a video about a reconnaissance robot called Recon Scout that inspired me to design a clone of it. Recon scout is a rugged, stealthy and mobile reconaissance robot which can be thrown through a window, over a wall, or down the stairs and it lands ready-to-go. You can even drop it from an unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle. Once deployed, you can control its movement at a distance using a hand-held operator control unit.
The Roller Bot
Grippers are an important part of robots. Often they are used in gripping and taking objects and play the most important role in robotic arms. Most of the grippers cost much money and may not be easily affordable by hobbyists. Then the best option is to build your own gripper.When it is from the so called ‘useless junk parts’, it becomes more interesting. So let us dive into more details.
My first prototype
