Joystick-controlled Robot
01-25-2012 Update: Une présentation du robot en Francais est disponible ICI
06-25-2011 Update : Here's a quick vid of the robot in action :
Hello, this is my very first Instructable, and It's going to be about a robot that I and a friend, Colin, have built these last two weeks (March 1st-12th) for a robotics competition, here in france. The competition is "Eurobot Junior" and was held in Toulouse, Mar 12th. You can find more details at this address : http://www.planete-sciences.org/robot/index.php?section=pages&pageid=102 . I've uploaded a zip file containing the competition rules in PDF and the software used to control the robot at this address : http://www.box.net/shared/c12bhjsz5d . The robot is powered by an Arduino Mega and is controlled over USB (arduino serial-to-usb) with an usb Joystick plugged into a PC via a little python script running on that PC. In my case, I use an Xbox 360 wireless controller with an usb adapter. I'll upload a video very soon of the robot running. I'm sorry that I can't better document and make step-by-step instructions for the robot, but fortunately, I have a whole bunch of photos of the build process. Here's a short video of the build : (I and my friend are french so the captions in the video are in french). I also apologize for the bad image quality, the photos were taken in low-light conditions with a phone camera. I still hope that this project will give ideas to other people ;) .
06-25-2011 Update : Here's a quick vid of the robot in action :
Hello, this is my very first Instructable, and It's going to be about a robot that I and a friend, Colin, have built these last two weeks (March 1st-12th) for a robotics competition, here in france. The competition is "Eurobot Junior" and was held in Toulouse, Mar 12th. You can find more details at this address : http://www.planete-sciences.org/robot/index.php?section=pages&pageid=102 . I've uploaded a zip file containing the competition rules in PDF and the software used to control the robot at this address : http://www.box.net/shared/c12bhjsz5d . The robot is powered by an Arduino Mega and is controlled over USB (arduino serial-to-usb) with an usb Joystick plugged into a PC via a little python script running on that PC. In my case, I use an Xbox 360 wireless controller with an usb adapter. I'll upload a video very soon of the robot running. I'm sorry that I can't better document and make step-by-step instructions for the robot, but fortunately, I have a whole bunch of photos of the build process. Here's a short video of the build : (I and my friend are french so the captions in the video are in french). I also apologize for the bad image quality, the photos were taken in low-light conditions with a phone camera. I still hope that this project will give ideas to other people ;) .