AVR Wireless Serial Communication

Progress continues with my AVR microcontroller board...
Today I was able to get some simple wireless serial communication tests working.

I followed this great tutorial post on AVR Freaks on creating interrupt driven USART echo program. I then took it a step farther and had each side of the serial link (PC and micro) echo the last character received pulse one.

All in all the test were not very interesting but they do lay groundwork for the development of a control packet structure for driving Gold Rush around.

AVR Dynamixel AX-12 Controller Running IK and Gait Engine

I was able to get my IK functions and gait engine running on my AVR micro.

Below is a short video of the front left leg running an 8 step ripple gait in the forward direction.

AVR Dynamixel AX-12 Controller

Over the last few days I have been working on my AVR microcontroller board that I posted about a while back.

So far I have been able to implement the Dynamixel AX-12 communication protocol and have successfully commanded an AX-12 servo.

I am now in the process of porting over my IK and gait engine from python running on my PC to C on the micro.

As always you can download my code here.

IPMechCam Progress

Work continues on the on IPMechCam.

I have been trickling some smaller updates in the IPMechCam thread in the Trossen Robotics Community forums. This post will serve as a wrap up of all the major updates.

Testing IPMechCam text widget and widget preferences.

IPMechCam has been rolled into a larger software package I am working on for walking robots by the name of UpgraydMech. As of today the only Upgrayd Mech tool available for testing is IPMechCam however. 

Four screen widgets are available with a few more in the works. A text widget allows the display of a label along with a value as text. A graph widget displays a value over time in an XY graph. A color scale widget presents a value as a graphical representation similar to a temperature scale. And the simple cross hair widget for gun targeting.

Widget preference settings have had the most improvements. The widgets preferences dialog allows for the creation individual widget instances. It also provides a nice interface for adjusting all the properties of the widgets, managing widget instances, and soon allow the saving and loading of widget settings.

Widgets are able to pull values out of a data stream. This data stream can be accessed by other UpgraydMech tools, robot controllers and robot systems. (Arbotix support? MechWarfare scoring system?)

If you would like to try IPMechCam:

1. Download and install Python (either version 2.5 or 2.6 is fine. I use 2.6)
2. Download and install wxPython GUI toolkit library.
3. Download the current version of UpgraydMech.
   
4. Unzip and run the UpgraydMech.py file.