16. March 2010 by admin.

I forgot to mention - I’m now using an 18F4525.  Compared to the 16f877a, it’s massive.  4x the programming space, 10x RAM, 4x eeprom and way more timers. 

It’s the same chip we’re using on a related project  - a GPS guided, solar powered boat:

www.solarcrawler.com

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15. March 2010 by admin.

I made some good progress this weekend.  Work (as in my day job, completely unrelated  to electronics) has been ridiculously busy so it’s been tough to squeeze this in.  But, I know the video needs to happen before Apr 1.

 I started out by ripping apart my old project from about a year ago (pictured in my first post) and put together a proper schematic and PCB using KICAD (open source, it’s great).  It took a while to get that bug free, but now all the bits are working and I just need to tie them together with some sort of behaviour logic. The GPS navigation will be ok, but I’m most worried about obstacles.  I would hate to go all the way to Boulder (I live in Victoria, BC, Canada) and have this thing get stuck on a rock or something.

Above is the set up I’m using, which is essentially this:

* MPLAB IDE
* Hi-Tech PICC-18 compiler in free mode. 
* Microchip ICD3 debugger/programer

On my board, I’ve got rs-232 out so I can do continuous debugging while downloading firmware changes using the ICD.  That’s shortened my development cycle considerably from the days of bootloaders and regular programmers.

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9. February 2010 by admin.

So, pretty excited about the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Race in April.  Is this great, or what??  I wish I had $1 M so that I could come in last in the real DARPA challenge but I guess I’ll have to settle for coming in last in Boulder.

Here are my specs as requested by the Sparkfun race organizers:

Team Name:                                      Geeknight Avenger 2000

Vehicle Type:                                     Roadster

Dimensions:                                        about 12” x 16” x 6”

Weight:                                              about 10 lbs

Special Vehicle Requirements:           Needs to win or gets very angry

Kill Switch:                                        Oh, there’ll be a kill switch, alright… mooohooowahaha

Some pics to start things off:

Side view…

Annotated top view…

 Covered top view…

Technical specs:

The main board is a PIC 16f877a programmed in Hi-Tech/Microchip C.  It’s got an LCD read out and will be using a Pololu motor driver board and a Devantech CMPS03 digital compass.  For GPS, I’m using a USGlobalSat em-406a GPS module with a Geeknight I2C/GPS Interface board.  Yeah, shameless promotion, baby!!

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