Posted by Matthew
There are two major microcontrollers in the hobby domain, the popular PIC and Atmel’s AVR line. PICs are tried and true in both commercial and hobby implementations, but the Atmel AVR offers affordable programming solutions, a free development environment, a free assembler and a stable gcc toolkit that work across the entire AVR line.
Posted by Matthew
While reading lugnet recently, I stumbled upon an extremely interesting little robot. It’s creator says it best:
While waiting for the NXT system to come out, I decided to try my luck at making tiny robots… Often, when working, I would drop a SMT and have to take a magnifying glass to find it as it would get lost in the bits of filings, etc that were around the work area…
Believe it or not, this little guy is a sumo robot. When he senses he’s found, he runs full speed for the edge of the rink!
Posted by Matthew
The good people over at E-DSP have churned out a comprehensive tutorial on how to use an lcd with your electronic devices. The Amtel AVR is their microcontroller of choice because of its cheap programmer. From pinouts to microcontroller code, they make it look easy. In a way it is.
Posted by Matthew
Ever wonder exactly how to use a servo motor? How about 16 of them from a single serial connection?
Make Magazine’s Blog dug up an interesting way to accomplish this. To update servo positions, a host sends a serial signal to an Amtel microcontroller. The Amtel remembers the positions and generates 16 different control signals. (One signal for each servo). The data is sent as follows:
The host is either the serial port of a computer or a single pin of a master microcontroller. Therefore, a PC program similar to his own can be used to find the exact servo positions necessary for the application before the code is embedded on a microcontroller in the robot.
Schematics and code are included. Other than that you are on your own.
