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Getting started

There are various off-the-shelf kits and pre-assembled components that you can use for robotics projects. For small fun robots similar to stiquito there are the Lego mindstorms kits and also Dave Hockeyrink's www.solarbotics.com site. I think the Lego robots are controllable from a PC to a limited extent, but the BEAM robots are purely analogue electronics and don't use any microprocessors at all.

For more advanced projects I would recommend the mondotronics site www.robotstore.com. Here there are various bits that can be used for robot building. For servo control on my stereo vision robot I used the miniSSC board from this site. The miniSSC is pre-assembled (no soldering needed on the board) and can be easily connected to a PC (you have to make your own interface cable, but it's a very easy two wire connection, which I made by splicing a null modem and telephone cable together). From a software point of view the miniSSC is pretty trivial, and simply involves sending a couple of bytes per axis to one of the COM ports. There is also a more advanced type of servo controller on that site which gives better speed control and other functions.

- Bob

136 posts.
Friday 07 December, 02:41
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Good info

I want to stay away from Mindstorms, because of the limited control options. Which is too bad actually, since I did a LOT with Lego as a kid and I have a large collection stashed away somewhere.

I think I want to start with tethered bots, since keeping the brains in the PC will give me more flexibility and allows for more powerful control software.

Eventually, I would also like to experiment with robot-vision, which I guess can be done using a web-cam.

The robotstore site seems to have an interesting collection!

Thanks,

Jeroen

28 posts.
Friday 07 December, 12:38
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