In 1985 I worked at Denning Mobile Robotics. It was awesome on so many
levels. I got to design motion control software. I got to design HEXFET (A
type MOSFET power transistor) H-Brige motor amplifiers. I worked with UNIX
on Sun, CP/M, MS-DOS 1.0, and a bunch of other stuff. Mostly, it was the
sort of environment where there was little documentation for the various
projects which we did. Motor control was a fairly new technology. High
efficiency PID algorithm based current converter amps were all the rage. I
also got to work with ultrasonics ranging systems. I got to work on phased
array ultrasonic. (Very new at the time)

Computers have never been as much fun as they were in the early to mid 80s.
Today it is all about boring business crap. Yea, you can make money, but
where is the invention? Where is the excitement?

Well http://oap.sourceforge.net/ The "open automation project" looks like
fun. I've got my mini-itx system, battery operated power supply, gel-cell
battery, dual opposed motorized wheels, and building the base with my son
next week.

linux is ideal for this stuff.

Anyone else interrested in robotics?

On Fri, 09 Jan 2004 17:49:12 GMT, mlw wrote:
Try Lego Mindstorms.

--
Linux 3jane.ertw.com 2.4.20-28.8 #1 Thu Dec 18 12:24:59 EST 2003 i586
11:55am up 2 days, 17 min, 1 user, load average: 0.09, 0.02, 0.01

Idiot.

--

Robert Foster.

mlw wrote:
I like robotics, because it uses pretty much every aspect of E.E. you
can think of. It's got the software aspect, real-time image processing
(to process data received from the "eyes"). And there's some analog
stuff too, such as output transistors driving motors, which are being
controlled by the onboard processors, which are receiving data from the
"eyes" and other sensors. In short, it's a field dealing with mobile
computers.



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General Protection Fault wrote:

mlw ...

You guys are like...how old ???

Donn Miller wrote:

Actually the transistors driving the motors operate in a digital saturated
mode. You typically use PWM to drive motors of any non-trivial current. It
is best to think of motor control as a digital on-off mode. In a mosfet
based H-bridge, you usually need to add power handling to the parasitic
diodes for inductor reactance, but I digress. :-)

Robotics is cool in that it is the ultimate of mechanical, electrical, and
software engineering.

mlw <mlw@nospam.no> wrote:

Working on something like that for a living. Basically it is motor control for
automotive applications ( ABS, Traction control, et al.). Basically I do the
proof of concept stuff and then toss it over to the development guys.

For hobbyist stuff, a cheap and interesting product line:
http://www.mccdaq.com/usb.html

For USD 109, you can get some pretty cool stuff. At home, I have managed to get
this fellow to control the direction of travel of the motor based on 2 inputs
(position and another variable) @ about 30 Hz. Its really cool thing to play
around with. All you need is this, Borland or Microsoft C compiler (Borland has
a gratis version, works like a charm) and you are all set for some good control
systems experiments. Ofcourse I had to scavenge for the H-Bridge and the
sensors, and I have an old power supply lying around.

At work, it is dSpace (http://www.dspace.de) commercial and expensive.

-a.

Anupam Sharma <asharma@phenix.rootshell.be> wrote:
Oops, the thread is titled Linux robotics and I rave about a win32 product.
Foot in wrong place..

This is supported on some *Nix platforms, but my shop is all Win32.

So I guess as far as Linux robotics go, this post was OT.

-a.

Jet wrote:

I bought Mindstorms for my son. He and I both found it lacking.

mlw threw some tea leaves on the floor
and this is what they wrote:

From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (13 Mar 01) [foldoc]:

robot

1. <robotics> A mechanical device for performing a task which
might otherwise be done by a human, e.g. spraying paint on
cars.


I love machine control and automation, x-y control of manufacturing
gear etc.

The things that really interest me are p&p pcb mounters, any automation
control and actuation used in manufacturing etc.

I've got a stepper motor whirring around next to me right now, under the
control of a microprocessor unit I designed years ago and sell
to the manufacturing industry, but it's no robot

About a year ago I saw some ex auto manufacturing robotics gear in a
factory where they were trying to get it to run. Bloody hell, the
powerful motors and hydralics in that stuff would kill you before you
even knew it if the programming was suspect or it had a fault and you
were in the killing radius of that machine!

The Fanuc Terminator!

--
Kind Regards from Terry
My Desktop is powered by GNU/LinuX, Gentoo-1.4_rc2
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Anupam Sharma wrote:

It's always good to know whats out there in Win32 land, as much as we don't
want to use it ;-).

--
Donovan Hill

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004 09:30:03 GMT, alt <spamtrap@gwsn.com> wrote:

Idiot.