latest engineering projects

Cerberes is a small three wheel robot that avoids obstacles which it senses with its active infrared sensors.

Each rear wheel has its own motor, the single front wheel is not powered. The robot steers "like a tank" by rotating the rear wheels in opposite direction.

The sensors are built with infrared LEDs which are running at 36kHz and two 36 kHz remote control receiver modules.
When the 36 kHz infrared light from the LEDs is reflected by an object, one of the receiver modules will be triggered, and the PIC16F84 µController will steer the ROBOT away from the objects by reversing one of the motors.

This small line follower robot, was designed to be easily built at home without any special equipment, and using a minimum number of mechanical parts. You wont need more than 2 small motors, 2 free wheels and a piece of pcb (to hold the micro-controller, the motors driver and the line sensor) and sure.. your soldering iron!

The main trick making this design simple and affordable, is that the robot's chassis

IS

actually the main board of the robot, where some supports for the wheels - also made of small parts of copper boards - are soldered to it. All the motors, and the skids are mounted on the main PCB. For an electronics hobbyist, PCB manufacturing is a skill that will

Recently many kind of robot contests have being opened and some interesting reports of the challenge are found on the web. The Line Following is a kind of the robot contests to vie running speed on the line. I build a tiny line following robot which can run on the desk, moving the key board aside will do. It is for only a personal toy reduced its size less than one fifth compared to typical line following robots, not in formura. But I believe that it is suitable for home use in the small Japanese houses said that rabbit burrow...(^_^;. Of course I have also no time to take part in the robot contests

The Atmel AVR series are very good microcontrollers with quite a rich instruction set, rich enough that lots of folks have good compilers for them so we don't have to learn their assembler. A very rich compiler available is the BASCOM/AVR compiler frommcs electronics . I've used this compiler for prototyping the software on my 90S2313 robot board for two reasons: One, It has a very rich command syntax; Two, its free in its demo version! The demo version only supports 2K of instruction memory, other than that it is completely uncrippled.