Reefat’s Robotics Blog

I was thinking about designing a Wireless Joypad to control my Robot, and finally came up with an idea to make it out of a cheap Gigaware PS2 Joypad found at Radioshack, which was only $9.99. It has: 2 Joysticks 1 8-way D-Pad (Direction Pad) 8 Action Buttons, and 4 Extra Buttons (Select, Start, Macro, Mode) So, I was searching on web, how to interface this PS2 Controller with Arduino, and finally found an Arduino compatible library called PSX Library. I used it with my Arduino and it didn’t... (more...)

Hi everyone, this is the improved version of my previous Differential Drive Robot. I didn’t think about any name yet; but will figure out one soon. Anyway, this improved prototype has an IR Rangefinder attached to it which can detect distance of any object in front of it within a range of 10cm to 80cm. And an extra servo is added to this new version to rotate the sensor left or right. Let’s take a closer look at the new prototype. Whenever the robot faces an obstacle in front of it, it looks... (more...)

I think, I am running too fast. After building the ATmega motherboard, I didn’t take more than 1 day to build the whole robot. This was just for testing purpose (not even experimental; you can say pre-experimental). At this very moment, I didn’t have any mechanical tool to build up a nice-looking handsome robot. I just got a box came with my NiMH battery charger, and just convert it to the chassis of my very first robot. Here is a close shot of my ghetto bot: The only task I assigned (programmed)... (more...)

Today I have just completed building the brain of my Robot, the MCU Board using ATmega8 AVR Microcontroller. This MCU Board can be powered by 6V Adapter or 5 1.2V NiMH Rechargable Batteries. ATmega8 AVR runs on 5V, and thet’s the reason I used National Semiconductor’s Low Dropout Voltage Regulator LM2940T. For programming the AVR, I am using AVRISP mkII In-System Programmer and AVR Studio Development IDE. The MCU Board has two I/O Ports – 8-Bit PORTD and 6-Bit PORTB, and 6-channel ADC.... (more...)

Download VB.6 Source ADC-Demo-VB.6.zip Download VB.NET Source ADC-Demo-VB.NET.zip AKPC_IDS += "75,";Popularity: 34% [?] Read More →

The first “Hello World!” project I prefer for Microcontroller is LED Blinking. I have used ATMEL’s 89C51 (40-pins DIP) 8051 architecture microcontroller which is ideal for first time learning MCU Chip. org 0000h loop: mov b, #0FFh acall delay clr p1.0 mov b, #0FFh acall delay mov p1, #0FFh ajmp loop delay: djnz acc, delay mov acc, #0FFh djnz b, delay ret end AKPC_IDS += "69,";Popularity: 57% [?] Read More →

This circuit is a small +5V power supply, which is useful when experimenting with digital electronics. Small inexpensive wall adapter with variable output voltage are available from any electronics shop and supermarket. Those adapters are easily available, but usually their voltage regulation is very poor, which makes them not very usable for digital circuit experimenter unless a better regulation can be achieved in some way. The following circuit is the answer to the problem This circuit can give... (more...)

This is a simple stepper motor controller which rotates a small wireless camera attached to it. This uses the same circuit of the previous project. The only difference is that the camera moves only if the Right or Left arrow key is pressed from keyboard. In the previous project the stepper motor used to rotate anti-clock wise. Here I change the code little bit to rotate is clockwise. I just simple reversed the step sequence. So for clockwise rotation the step sequence is: STEP-1   0001    ... (more...)

This is my first stepper motor project where the I have used NIPPON PF35T-48L4 unipolar motor which I controlled from a PC through the Parallel Port (LPT1, DB25). I simply used a ULN2003A IC which uses 7 Darlington Transistor Array to amplify the input current comming from the port. This 16-pin IC is capable to take TTL input and the output load may have high voltage upto 50V. I wrote small program in Visual Basic 6 using inpout32.dll driver. Here is a screenshot for the unipolar stepper motor and... (more...)