JeremyBlum.com

If you don’t read hackaday already, you should be, because it’s probably the best blog around.  Anyways, they’ve recently featured my roboclaw on their website: go check it out!

Here’s some of my other stuff that’s been on Hackaday:
http://hackaday.com/2008/07/14/deepnote-guitar-hero-bot/
http://hackaday.com/2009/05/17/nerf-centry-gun-with-image-recognition/

This is a project that I’ve been working on on-and-off for over a year now. A while back, a friend got me this robotic claw kit from thinkgeek, basically to make fun of my prosthetics research.  It’s simple enough…A wired controller is connected to the claw and has a few levers for eliciting movement from the arm’s various motors.  As you might expect, I got bored with picking up blocks rather quickly.  I instantly had the idea to pick up blocks remotely!  Oh what fun that would be!  To accomplish this I employed one of my favorite microcontrollers, the parallax propeller. Admittedly, the propeller is overkill for this project, but it’s what I happened to have on hand–It has 8 cores and I am only using one, but this is only v1 of the claw, and I hope to take better advantage of this chip in the future.  The propeller chip communicates with a small web server (also sold by parallax) via a serial connection.  I’ve even setup a network webcam, and embedded the feed in the control webpage, so I can easily control the claw from anywhere in the world!

Read on for pictures, source-code, a video, and a walk-through of the system!

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The nerf sentry gun was developed as a final project for Cornell University’s CS1114 Matlab Robotics class.  Jason Wright (www.jasonline.net) and I worked on the gun together, and were awarded “coolest final project”.

Check out the video of the gun in action, and see how we built it:

READ ON FOR PICTURES, SOURCE CODE, AND A COMPLETE FEATURE LIST

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We didn’t win!  In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m talking about the Parallax Propeller Design Competition that we entered the DeepNote Guitar Hero Bot into.  That can probably be attributed the fact that 15% of the score was based on the practicality of the project.  We probably got a 0% for that…  Oh well, we still got Special Recognition from Parallax and a place on their website.  You can go check out the other project entries here; there are some extremely well done entries.  Here is our humble little page on the Parallax Site.

In related news, I’ve released all the source code, schematics, parts lists, etc. to the DeepNote “Build Your Own” page.  We don’t have any plans to release a full tutorial on how to build a bot, but with the information provided it shouldn’t be too hard to manage.  In fact, you won’t even have to program the darn thing because we’ve provided the source code!

Parallax, the creator of the BasicStamp microcontroller that I used on my prosthetic prototype, and the propeller chip used in the DeepNote Guitar Hero Bot, has a section on their website where they feature winning projects that have been made using their products. They’ve decided to feature my project on their site! You can go check out the Parallax “Winner’s Circle” HERE.

PS.  We should also be hearing from Parallax sometime this week regarding the winners of the Propeller Design Contest that we entered DeepNote into.

We have successfully submitted the information for our DeepNote Guitar Hero Bot to the Parallax Propeller (the microcontroller we used) Design Contest.  The contest judges entrants on the following criterion:

• 30% Propeller Design Appropriateness Determined on applicant’s ability to use the Propeller’s unique architecture to achieve a working design. An entry which receives the highest mark in this category will utilize the Propeller to achieve a design not possible with a traditional microcontroller.

• 30% Originality Creativity of the project.

• 25% Professionalism This is based on the use of clear English in the Project Report, a quality design (if needed), clarity of explanations, quality of pictures and source code formatting/commenting.

15% Practicality Based on the project’s usefulness.

Check out all the competition information HERE