Dragonsreach

Tanked As I mentioned in  part 1 , I had drawn the conclusion that legs were not what I wanted and that tank treads are probably the most overkill for weight bearing. So , I ordered a Rover 5 base. Rover 5 robot base Unforeseen requirements When the Rover base arrived I opened the box to discover something I had completely overlooked; I didn't have a motor controller. With no clue of what an H-Bridge was and a new found determination I decided to build my own motor controller using about 6 relays. It was finally time to get serious about soldering on those proto-boards. I used a breadboard to prototype a system that used 6 relays and 4 transistors. You could hear the loud clickity clack of the relays as the direction changed but I was pretty proud of my ingenuity. It was time to solder! This was the most intricate soldering task I had ever undertaken and it really showed that I'm more of a software kind of guy. I perceived it to be the longest time I have eve

Introduction This will be part one in a series where I ( A software developer ) share my experiences in an attempt to build a fully wireless robot. This series will be targeted at other software developers wanting to do the same , who can hopefully learn from my mistakes , and electronics engineers who would like a good laugh. The software: As this is aimed at software people we will start by talking about the software, before delving into the unknown and getting electrocuted. Before I even started buying parts, I had decided to go with the following "stack": Raspberry Pi with wifi dongle Arduino microcontroller Firmata Johnny-five As you can tell from the need for johnny-five this is indeed a JavaScript robot. The Idea is to run the JS on the Pi and have it control the Arduino and in turn control the robot. One thing to note on this is that the Pi's default package manager does not load the latest version of node.js so you are going to have to compile a ne