Mobile Coaster

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Concept

Current Work

The received signal is filtered by a bandpass circuit. The output is made into a clean digital signal by some Shottkey inverters.

Unfortunately, the circuit is a little unstable. It tends to oscillate sometimes. This is likely due to a combination of the breadboarding mess (it is a bit of a rat's nest) and the loose tolerances of the parts.

I intend to fix this by dumping this circuit altogether. I will be replacing it with a LM567 based design. Doing so will lower the component count and size so that I can actually use the breadboard on the Sumobot base. That, in turn, will allow me to remove a tier from the bot, making the center of gravity lower.

Okay. I have now fixed that circuit. It is still sensitive to noise but filters MUCH better now.

Here is a short film of it in action. The mpeg is ~2MB in size. LED Detector

So far the platform looks like this:

The big black block is a 6V, 1300mAh, sealed lead-acid battery. I didn't feel that the four AA batteries would provide enough current to last driving around laden down by a full drink holder. Unfortunately, it is now even heavier! If I can find some rechargable AA batteries that have a high mAh (milliamp-hour), I will consider using them. One of the other advantages of using the sealed Pb-Acid is that I can charge it without taking the bot apart.

But that is what I have to work with and I am sure I can find a way around it. In fact, I have kludged some test code together that even works! Please keep in mind that this code is only prototype and is neither complete, pretty, nor entirely functional. I still have yet to add forward motion and collision avoidance, for example.

This code only detects and turns toward the LED emitter: Proto Code.

main page: MarkHinkle