The AVRCam is an open source, AVR based camera which offers many of the same features as the CMU Cam. The AVRCam will let you download full frames, or track blobs in front of the camera. It uses the same OV6620 sensor used in the CMUCam, and offers QCIF (176x144) images from the CIF(352x288) sensor.

JRO has entered line following competition robots based on this sensor, and performed very well, taking second place at the last Chibots advanced line following competition.

THe AVRCam is available for sale now on

Core77.com is an industrial design resource website. It contains information about materials and their applications, and has interesting information building up in it's forums as well. I highly recommend browsing it's blog archives for cool news articles. While not strictly a robot related site, it is full of neat ideas, and is a great way to juice up your imagination. I also found Dynamic Materials in Core77's hopping busy forums. All in all, this site is a great resource.

This + this = This.

Kringling. Santa is everywhere.
Honey... Hide your MP3 player.
Muwhuhuhahaha!

I have been coding non-stop on a new theme for Army of Evil Robots. Helen was nice enough to create a new template idea (thanks hon!), and I have been slaving away getting it working.

I am also doing a lot of work on the Rant server (which is now actually this server). Unfortunately, last week, the original Rant server died for no apparent reason. Serendipitously, the server died the day after I had finished moving all of the old sites over to this server. Crazy eh? 410 days of uptime, and it dies one day after the most comprehensive backup ever. Later analysis brought the old server up with no problems, and I could never find out why it crashed.

I just finished milling out the new quadrature boards for the belligerator. These ones are able to be adjusted for clearance relative to the wheel (since the tolerances are not as tight as I was hoping).

Next up is the prototype version of the large logic board on the front of the bot.

Roland Piquepaille's blog, has a story about self navigating cars. Apparently there is a push to create cars that drive themselves. While robot controlled vehicles are clearly not ready for the mainstream, progress is being (rapidly) made. A timeline of 20-30 years does not seem too unrealistic.

Of course, other obstacles may prevent the automatically piloted car from ever seeing the market. Even if the robot vehicle is 100 times as safe as a human would be, and everybody switches to the new robot drivers, that still leaves (statistically) 500 deaths and innumerable injuries every year, which can be pinned directly on the designers of the control systems.

I just had to share this project. The Machine Project has created an unusual robot which can roam a convention floor with a radio-linked head mounted cockroach acting as the bio-computer that controls it.

There is a control schematic which looks to be fairly easy to build, and a page full of 5 megapixel promo photos, and an explanation of the project.

The roach looks uncomfortable.

Just saw this cool new project while I was browsing robots.net. Looks like somebody has built (thanks to a National Science Foundation grant) a Python robotics API. Pyro includes simulation of various mainstream robot chassis, as well as access to the gazebo 3d environment robot simulator.

The great thing here is that you can quickly simulate a robot, without writing a ton of C code up front. I have long preferred Python for quickly mocking up programs, but recently I have been finding that there is no real reason to go any further than the mockup. The Python programs are usually fast enough (and very easy to extend with a little bit of C if they are not), and avoid the usual buffer overflow, memory leak, and other misc C related debugging issues.

I am still working on the conversion software. Progress is pretty quick, all things considered. I am getting more and more impressed by Drupal, since it looks like somebody who has a solid understanding of databases designed the DB layout. I was able to use the procedure outlined in the drupal forums... Turns out that heavy manual interaction is still faster than writing a whack of code.

I hope to have my blog entries in by tonight.

UPDATE: All of my old blog updates are now installed, and it looks like I didn't lose any information. On the down side, I had to delete all of the comments, since they were mostly comment spam. Boohoo.

I was just experimenting with my new Solarbotics Servo Wheel and a QRD1114 sensor, in order to make a quadrature encoder for my servo wheel. I thought that I would share the method of my madness, so that nobody out there would need to repeat my experiments needlessly...

I chose a quadrature pattern that would mount on the inside of the wheel. Print this template out and cut a hole in the middle just large enough for your axle (if necessary). Cut out using a razor blade, and trim to fit inside the wheel. The qrd1114 will reflect nicely from white paper, but barely from the black wheel.

Next, take a look at the following schematic: QRD1114 quadrature schematic. With this schematic, you will get nice clean logic levels, tuned to give you well under 1V when the white is in front of the sensor, and tuned to give you about 4.5V when the black wheel plastic is in front of the sensor. You did get a BLACK wheel, didn't you?