Peripherals/Robots

NOTE: The contents of this page are not set in stone, and are subject to change! This page is a draft in active flux ... Please leave suggestions on the talk page.

The main idea is to manage a simple robot from the analogue output of the XO (There are Pippy code examples that can output analogue data).

Actual state

The present focus is beginning doing simulations, this is going to be done with the Pygame branch of the code. The first kind of simulations are of the type less given path to achieve a goal. the code needed to do so has to be display in some part of the screen (Pippy style).

• [1]http://cs.brynmawr.edu/BeyondLegos/Images/BraitenbergWorld.png (World example)
• [2]http://www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden/BeyondLegos/Images/Pyrobot.jpg (World with obstacles)
• [3]http://bubo.brynmawr.edu/~dblank/images/pyrobot-3d.png (Sensors Example)

Some additional worlds or scenarios that can be take into count are related to solution of labyrinths. chasing mice, black line followers, ANN, light follower simulation Hardware specific simulations

Hardware Interaction Part

The hardware interaction part can be done with the pygtk and glade branch of Robots Code. Lib usb and peripherals are of interest, different robotic hardware platforms like legos, home made, Aibos..

Other Way

Another way to do so is using some embedded system and compiling player on it, another laptop, in this case the XO would act like the client and by wireless transmit the necessary info, this could be made in sugar on in other window manager as now we can install debian on it. For this to function we need an specific driver to interact with the embedded card.

Activity Code

• http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/rafael/Robots.Activity/.git;a=summary (GTK)
• http://dev.laptop.org/git?p=users/rafael/Robots/.git;a=summary (PyGame)

Notes

• The first to do is making a simple activity that sends signals to a simple circuit connected to a couple of motors. The output could be digital or analogue.The digital output is convenient for direct application to DC motors, like servomotors.

• The motors have to be joined in a simple platform, made form recyclable materials, so the cost of the construction is very slow.
• This activity also has to be shareable by the means of the hellomesh activity.

• In a later stage of development the little robot has to be controlled remotely.

• Also the USB alternatives should be investigated.
• The source code has to be visible for the children.
• Another take on the development could be without the need of hardware, only the simulation process, for this a nice project to check out is Pyrobot.

References to Construct the activity

• Pippy
• Hello World!
• Collaboration Tutorial
• Activity tutorial
• Measure_/_Oscilloscope

Other related projects

• This page shows one example, an XO on top of a Roomba robot vacuum cleaner. This project cleverly uses the camera to show the robot's view on a webpage; the same page allows the robot to be driven remotely.

• USB related: Within the 1A USB power limit, a few small hobby servos could be connected and run off of the OLPC's battery. They could easily receive a pulse width signal from the headphone port, or a $1 USD microcontroller to control them via USB.

more information how to go about this would be fantabalistic