Halloween

To celebrate for Halloween, I decided to post some pics of my pan/tilt mount so far. It's still a work in progress so expect some renders in the next couple of days. The next project i'm going to work on with this is to do some environment mapping, but since the NXT doesn't have support for trig functions I'm going to need to develop support for that too. I'll probably do this just using LUT's but if anybody has any other ideas let me know.






Pan Mount











Tilt Mount w/ Ultrasonic

NXT w/ Ultrasonic

So I finished up the first part of this project, the robot pans and tilts like a champ! It's been running for about 2 hours now, which is good because I was worried about some mechanical issues with the Lego gears and with how consistent the Lego motors are, but it looks to be running really well. When it detects an object at a certain distance it stops searching. I would like to make the tracking more advanced, although it might be fairly complex since the ultrasonic is pretty coarse. More updates to follow.

New library, Pan-Tilt Done

So I finished the Pan-Tilt demo in LabView for my NXT side-project, and I figured I should start pushing the things I've done up to my website so other people can check them out. I did this by adding a new page to my site, http://www.thesciencedude.com/library/librarymain.htm
I will be posting a CAD file for my pan-tilt mount in the next couple days, so stay tuned!

On a side-note, congratulations Mike and Amy!

NXT w/ LabView

So I got a NXT kit from a colleague at work, and I'd like to start developing some functionality for it. My ideas so far:

• Develop a ultrasonic mapping tool that works on a guided stationary turret (1 DOF now, possibly 2 later) that displays a graph of how far away objects are.
• Develop some control algorithms (including some limited PID controls) for motor positioning. this would be applicable for the classical inverted pendulum problem.
• Maybe some fairly complex line following, I've never been a huge fan of this kind of application just because its not a very realistic real-world solution (and it makes it worse when people think that it is) but it is interesting nonetheless.

This is of course in concurrence with all the other work I'm involved with as well, so it might be awhile before I am able to post any documents. But I'll try to knock this out and see what the NXT can really do.

My First Blog

Hi, thanks for coming to my blog. In the future, this blog will be all about the different projects that I work on in the fields of robotics, control engineering, embedded systems and that kind of thing. Please feel free to comment as much as you want. Thanks for stopping by!