Journal2001May
From Simreal
Contents |
May 2001
I have to blush here... it's already June 4th, and I'm just getting this stuff put up.
I'm going through my links and tidying them up some. It's been ages since I've done that.
Valerie Chow of Burrud Productions has been interested in the Boris project for a while now. She finally got an opportunity to film Boris in action for a TV show for the Travel Channel. She originaly wanted to do a "Robots across America" segment, but she ended up doing a "Weird Austin" show instead! I guess that's appropriate.
Boris behaved fairly well for the photo shoot... but by the end, another controller decided to be flaky.
The week before the shoot, we had a good panic -- the HEX files created on the computer in John's garage weren't working! Boris was brain dead! I found an old Boris Brain HEX on my computer and, thankfully, it worked. However, we still need to figure out what's up with John's version -- theoretically, they were created from the same source and compiled on the same compiler.
I am actually thinking of upgrading Boris's brains (yet again)... I know it seems a horrid waste of time, but he is such a good platform for testing new hardware! When Boris operates, he just beats the heck out of his equipment, power, and so on.
The new book is code-named "R2" for Robotics book #2... duh. I think they may even name it "Applied Robotics 2", but you never know with a publisher. It was originally going to be published this September but I ran into some snags. Instead, we moved it to the next best slot, March 2002.
The hitch was with regards to the arm I'm building for this platform (and book). Not an easy project, but dang, nobody has an arm project out there like this! If I would give in and do fancy machining, I would like to build an arm like Cog's at MIT. But I try to limit myself to projects that anyone with a drill and band saw can do. Maybe next book.
For R2, I am building a much larger robot platform and going into more details on batteries, motors, controllers, and so forth, than I did in R1. I am also talking a lot more about robotic intelligence (which I call Simulated Intelligence; I'm not trying to reproduce human intelligence, but create a new form... a simulated intelligence. It also fits with my company name).
Also for R2, I am moving away from the Atmel chips and into the Cygnal system-on-a-chip MCUs. These provide an infinitely better debugging environment than the Atmel, and they make most of the chips on the MCU board disappear. Very nice. It's also a very fast chip. I know that the HC12 and many other existing chips do much of what the Cygnal does, but I'm a masochist and a sucker for new tech... gotta love it!
When R2 hits the shelves, I'm going to obsolete my old circuit boards currently for sale on the site. They are going away -- this new system will be so much better.
Until next month (er, the end of this month...)...
