It’s an increasingly digital world, but not all information comes packaged neatly in 1s and 0s. Sometimes you have to deal with analogue voltage levels using the microcontroller’s analogue to digital (ADC) converter. Measuring analogue voltages is made easy in Arduino projects because the IDE comes with a handy analogRead() function. Providing your input voltage does not exceed what the… Read more »
With any robot, it’s always useful to have some form of remote connection, if not full remote control. The question is how to achieve this. By the way, in this post, I’m definitely in ‘thinking out loud/workshop notebook’ mode, because nothing described here is finished. I’m just playing with concepts. Now, when I mention ‘remote control’, I’m not talking about… Read more »
Microcontrollers can be busy little beasts. That’s because we load them down with jobs to do – sometimes too many jobs. In the main loop of an Arduino, AVR or whatever microcontroller takes your fancy, we often spend time polling sensors and then throwing away the data as uninteresting. On the robots I’ve built in the past, for example, that polling… Read more »
The overall architecture of the Sheldon robot is going to be modular. Aside from a central computer (probably a Raspberry Pi or some such), there will be multiple computers or microcontrollers each managing some sub-system. And the first of these is for motion control. I decided on this hierarchical approach because of previous experience building robots. Most of these were… Read more »