New Robot Demo

Posted on 14:25 by Flyku

Here is a video i made of my robot performing its obstacle evasion routine. I intend to use it as a part of a presentation when i come to the end of the project, for now here it is. Hope you like it :)


I have aloso been given a few IR distance sensors, i want to put them on the robot to improve navigation in the next version of the code, it should also allow me to use the robot for maze solving aplications.

Making noise with arduino

Posted on 14:54 by Flyku

Since i started using arduino i have been looking for new ways of getting technology to interact with anyone using it and visa versa. A great way to do this is to use sound, however untill recently, in my experience this has been relatively hard to do.
A new library in the arduino IDE has solved this, the Tone( ) function allows you to generate a square wave with a frequency of your choosing. By connecting a Piezo or 8ohm speaker to a digital I/O on the arduino you can call tone( pin , frequency, duration ) and create single tones or melodies very simply. The best part of this library is that the tone( ) function doesn't cause any delays in the rest of the program.

Another way of adding audio to your project is to use an additional circuit like the Sparkfun MP3 trigger, using a circuit like this you can copy MP3 files to an SD card and play them back using a trigger from the arduino. This would be great for adding voice or music to your project or for giving your robot a voice :)
So far i have added an 8 ohm speaker to my robot and got it to make little beepy noises but in the future i want to give it a voice, so look forward to more updates soon.