AvronicsMicroMouse

intro

I'm very interested in the form factor because it gives me a cheap, robust robot suitable for swarming. I whipped up a test bed in about an hour (so it's not much to look at - but given the effort I put in I'm very please with this bot) which you can check out at AvronicsFirstBot.

Check out http://www.uvm.edu/~jmurch/avronics/ for the latest videos! Once they wise up that he graduated you'll have to rely on YouTube.

This robot gloms together a couple geared motors, beam inspired 74als245 h-bridges drivers (possibly made with a 74hct240 - can't remember) and the AVRonics controller. Each driver has a FWD and REV input so to simplify things I've built the driver to have the motors be either on or off (no speed control but its so slow that doesn't really matter). Four digital IO control the two motors.

I am now working on implementing behaviors in the micromouse. Since there are no sensors there aren't many reactions that this thing can have but i'm working on it.

news

• 08 Oct 2005 - configured FreeRTOS (preemptive micro kernel for various targets) to control the robot. There are 2 processes running under the scheduler.

• vHeartbeat - regularly flash the heartbeat LED to signal the the system is running
• vMotors - preliminary motor control process. Drive the robot in this pattern: fffl

• 23 Mar 2006 - i have lost my avronics board - no new avronics news until i build another one
• 26 Jan 2007 - been a while since i've looked at this page. I've had all 4 avronics boards for a while now they run the WindLcdMeter and are the platform I develop all of my AVR stuff on except the PicGloGlobe (that uses an Attiny26 despite the name)

-- ChristopherPepe - 17 Mar 2006