Arduino Robots

I bought a Arduino board for a green house project I was planning to do sometime last year. To regulate the temperature, turn on and off lights and fans, data logging, ect. A friend ended up giving me some deadacated hardware making the Arduino project a lot of extra work for very little gain and I abandon it. This little board has been sitting on my shelf for the good part of a year collecting dust.

A few days ago I saw some videos of sumobots (Robot-sumo, or pepe-sumo, is a sport in which two robots attempt to push each other out of a circle (in a similar fashion to the sport of sumo). The robots used in this competition are called sumobots.) on robots.net and youtube.

Instantly fell in love with the idea and started looking for a local robot club that did compations. http://vancouverroboticsclub.org/ came up first in google. They do run regulate contests such as Basic Table Top Challenge that look interesting. I was looking for something more competitive but its as good as any place to start.

I ended up buying a motor shield from http://www.adafruit.com/ that worked perfectly with my RC car that I bought a few years ago. After a few hours of tweaking I was able to write a simple API to control it properly. The RC car only really has two speeds, really really fast and reverse. So it speeds thou the course I programed a little too fast.

Next is to add sensor to it so it drive its self with out predefining the path. I ordered some medium and short range ultrasonic range finder and a few other toys to play with.

New words of the week.

• Wall wart is a slang term for certain types of power supply - typically those that are embedded in an over-sized AC plug.
• kthxbye disrespectful form of quick politeness and salutation after one has served a purpose to another.