Hello fellow-robotics,
My story (skip this if you want ) the story was really strange. All of the sudden, totally obsessed by walking robots, I got in attack mode and started hunting for quadrupeds and hexapods on youtube. I was amazed by the complexity of the robots. I'm a C++ coder for several years now and always had the urge to code something not 'on a computer', a robot, walking on it's own.
Yadda-yadda-yadda. I watched a video, and it ended with: "
www.societyofrobots.com". Offcourse I checked the site out, watched some tutorials and registered. I had a chat with my father (yup, I'm still a youngster) and he is a great robotics programmer too
... Or at least, was. 10 years ago...
But (thankgod) he still had some microprocessors laying around (PIC16F84), various resistors, batteries, a "PICSTART plus" and other components. So I plugged some basic stuff into a prototyping board. Took the serial cable out of the box and went hunting for a serial port... Yeah, right. Apparently, my newly-bought, kickass computer doesn't have a COM-port. So much for the 'kickass' part
.
Quickly we got one of our old computers out of the box, installed Win98, the new MPLAB and: "Your firmware is out of date" ... Lol, my dad's PICSTART plus has revision number 4
.
So: My dad and I want to start programming, he bought the picstart upgrade. And I'm waiting for it
My robot I'm busy purchasing 12 servos (I need some feedback. Hitec HS-311? Any good? (small time bot, maybe 30cm * 20cm total, including legs) and because my dad still runs a company officially (he stopped it 8 years ago), I can order components at farnell! I asked for some samples from microchip, they're on their way. And I'm on my way building a quadruped! It might seem too advanced for a beginner (okay, maybe it is too advanced for a beginner), but hey... I got my dad to help me out, and can program pretty well in both C++ and C.
So, I got all designing crazy and started designing
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Please note: Maybe I used some functions in the leg schematics that I'm unable to use, such as 'Servo2Degrees' and stuff, but when I get to learn how to use a servo, I'll figure out a workaround
.
It's flash, so you can zoom in and outThe moral: Hello guys!
-Max Henger