Update: Project ALF

Alright, well the demo came and past. Late in the night both Dan and I got the robot's main board debugged. Its great when you realize that a voltage regulator is in backwards. Then decide its too much work to fix it and just rip it out and call it a night... But that's what we did. The H-bridge really doesn't need to be regulated because it can handle voltages from 4-55V ... or WAY more then some voltage spike is going to be able to produce.

I thought for an end of term wrap up it would be nice to see what is done. Below is the "finished" robot, that has secured us a pass in the course if we do nothing else.

The Pimpmobile, complete with low profile yellow rims.

LED...Check
Clear Plastic...Check
Sweet Black tape...Check

I've done more than my fair share thus far. The Robot is my design, the PCB I designed, the Pic is all my code. The only thing that the others have done was solder it together (I did help though), and have some "Research" done. ...Pisses me off. What we have done at this point is a robotic car, that runs on batteries and can be programmed with pre-programmed routines (I put in Straight, Left, Right, ZigZag, attempted circle).

What needs to be done at this point is:
-Get the thing running at 40Mhz (Its at like 2 or 4 right now)
-Get the PWM working on both motors (Stops jerky motion)
-Get IR Leds running
-Get Wheel Encoder Data

The above stuff shouldn't be too hard, most of the legwork is done already, just needs to be hacked together better.

From January on we need to:
-Capture that Wheel Data and interpret it nicely. (Wirelessly)
-Need to get the Pic thinking on its own, not just "do what I say" mode
-Wireless communication
-Most importantly: This SOB needs a Friggin Body on it!! I'm going to make up a sweet bodykit for it.

All of this will be of course done in our super high tech lab:

That window just reminds us how much time we spend inside.

...aka my old basement.

Thats it for the update, it works thus far! That makes me happy. But were not done yet.