More fun with robots

July 6, 2009 · 1 min read

Last Friday I’ve received new Futaba S3001 servos. Turns out they are more easier to modify to Hitec’s, and at the same seem more reliable. I’ve simply followed this, and you can also find some. What most important the servos are also easier to calibrate, so now my SERB will actually stop in place when I want it.

Below is a short video of the completed SERB robot where it just runs in random directions:

This weekend I’ve also started looking at Microsoft Robotics Development Studio 2008. This environment promises easy entry level to robotics. However this is true only when you have a compatible robotics platform (like Lego Mindstorms NXT, fishertechnik, iRobot and few others). There are pretty good tutorials on how to control these robots both from C# and from VPL. However before I can apply them to my SERB robot, first I need to implement the hardware interface and generic services to control the robot. Not much information on this and closest what I found so for is the Robotics Tutorial 6 – Remotely Connected Robots. It would be cool to get more detailed example on writing such services, but fortunately source code of services for other robots is included. In particular I’m trying to understand the code for iRobot and. If you know of any other good examples or tutorials please let me know.

This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Szymon Kobalczyk

New on Geeks with Blogs

  • We Won The One Award I Actually Care About

    Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 for the fifth year straight, the 12th listing across my three companies. Here is why the one award you cannot buy is worth stopping for.

  • Your Customers Build the Features Now

    I let a tool I liked sit dead for a year rather than build the features I wanted. An MCP server meant I never had to, and your customers can do the same to your product.

  • Get the Size of a Directory in Linux the Easy Way

    du -sh for the quick answer, ncdu for the cleanup, df for the disk itself: every command for checking directory size in Linux, plus why du and df never agree.

  • Vim Search and Replace: The Ultimate Guide

    One :%s command replaces every match in a file before a find dialog would even open. The Vim substitute patterns worth the muscle memory: flags, ranges, capture groups, and multi-file edits.