Robotics Crash Course, Part 2

Ok, so if you've been following us from part 1 of the crash course, you'll know that we're beginning to build a very simple robot. So simple, it's effectively a laptop duct taped to a robot vacuum cleaner. Since Damon has done such a good job of documenting the process up to here, i'm just going to refer you to his Instructables page. But let's talk about the important improvements in this step...

In case you're wondering, i did the optional power step he describes. *THIS* is why I'm using the OLPC laptop for now: nothing else is this flexible with their power inputs. I can't hook up anything else this easily. My eeepc 701 for example wants a nice clean 9.5 v at 2.5 amps. Not happenin' (yet)...

The really important thing to note here is we have just potentially made our robot self-sufficient. The robot base AND the laptop can now dock with the docking station and recharge their batteries whenever they see fit. You could easily make the "low battery" warning trigger the dock-seek subroutine, set it up on a schedule, whatever. Point is: our robot can now (potentially) function indefinitely without the need of a human to refuel it. Obviously it can't wander off too far, or it won't make it back to the docking station, but hey, big step here.

Of course, there is a really big drawback here as well: the laptop will suck power from the robot constantly. Which means less battery life for the robot. We'll fix that in our next step...

The other thing to note here is we now have some nifty software! It's not perfect, but it's better than VNCing into the laptop and some other craziness. Pretty basic for now, but we'll upgrade that later. It's made in Python, which means it'll run on pretty much anything with a little tweaking. It also means it can run a tad slow, but for now it works. Much expansion here in the next step too...

So tune in next time, you damn kids with your music...