My introduction (new member).

[SciTech02]

Hello, this is my first post here, but not my first time on a forum (or even a robot forum).  I thought I'd create an introduction to my situation.

I got interested in robotics several years ago and bought my first robot, the BOE-Bot (a wonderful little thing).  I joined parallax's forum and tinkered/played with the BOE-Bot for some time, maxing it out.  However, on that forum I talked about computer vision and intelligent navigation (which I could not make the BOE-Bot do at the time).  At that time, a person metioned the ER-1 robot and posted links about it.  I immediately became interested and sold my BOE-Bot so I could get an ER-1.  This was several years ago and by then they stopped making the ER-1, so I waited and waited (the company kept pushing back the date when they would re-release it). 

Now, about 2 months ago, I finally got one and, finding batteries for the robot/laptop, got it working.    It's different then I expected, but I'm still trying to get used to it (the GUI it uses is anoying). 

So now I'm here.  I see at least 1 person here has an ER-1 robot and countless others who built PC-based robots, so I thought I'd come here (since the forum for the ER-1 robot does not exist anymore).  I hope to do great things with the ER-1 and perhaps enter it in one of these contests. 

SciTech02 (PS. sorry for the long post) 

[Ro-Bot-X]

Welcome to the forum!

I have an ER1 kit, although is pretty used by now (the hardware parts start to come loose...) The battery died and I had it replaced by a bigger one, the charger's transformer died, I still need to replace it, the camera shows only a black image. I didn't do much with this kit, yes, I have built a robot, but didn't finish programming it, had some hardware issues and decided to rebuild.

So here is a link to another forum where there are some ER1 users: http://pruim037.proboards107.com/index.cgi?board=nonww&action=display&thread=2078. You may find nice info there. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to pass on the knowledge.

[SciTech02]

Thanks for commenting! 

I notice you were on that forum as well, asking about disabling the laptop battery monitoring feature from the RCC (I had the exact same problem!  I got around it by finding another laptop battery.). 

Question: I see you were programing the API using python (I was interested in using this programing language, how is it?).  Now, can you create a program in python and still use basic ER1 commands (like the events command, ER1 command and set command)?  The ER1 manual talks about them and I wanted to use features of the RCC in the general python code (so I'm basicly asking can I create a program in the API that is in python, but uses API commands). - - Oh, I think I found the answer for that question (on page 10-2 of the ER1 user guide, it says that the API is "written in a language neutral way, they can be used by most programing and scripting languages including C, C++, Perl, Java, Visual Basic, etc." 

Thank you for that link and offering help; it is nice to meet someone who actually owns an ER1 robot.

[Ro-Bot-X]

I didn't do much in Python or any other language since I am not a programmer and didn't had the time to learn it. After I found a person willing to help me program it, I kept asking for the C SDK on that forum and someone gave me the SDK. But my buddy had some fammily matters and didn't get a chanse to even look at it, then school exams and so on, until I gave up on him. Maybe some day I will learn enough programming to do it myself. Probably by that day it will be obsolete, but who knows?