George Frick

There has been next to no progress on my robot; this has been due to buying a house and realizing I would need to do a lot of work on it. That aside; I now have a work bench coming together and the time and money freeing up to get back to it (yay!). There is some news; there is now a local Maker Space getting started up. This may provide tools, resources and people to work with. I am very excited since I live nearby (about a mile away); though there is no way I could currently afford the membership fee. We will see; as I plan to stop by one of their open houses. More exciting; I have purchased a part. I saw the part come up on my reader feed and realized it was cheap and would go quickly. I refer to the 1.8 inch 18 bit color TFT LCD display with microSD card breakout released by adafruit. At only $25.00 I knew they would be gone in an instant so I just went ahead and purchased one! My goal for this is to use it for output from the robot; debugging output in the short term and more...

Well, working with Netbeans I have a problem occur over and over. One of those annoying programming tasks where you always make the change but are too lazy to deal with underlying problem. Today I decided to address on of them. Every time I create a class in Netbeans, there is a comment that appears at the top: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ My co-workers leave this in place; I am OCD about removing it every time. I don't like four lines of useless code at the top. This morning I decided to change this problem and maybe make my Java class templates a little better. I will walk through improving the class template, and adding the license file for display. This is a stub class created before the changes: /*  * To change this template, choose Tools | Templates  * and open the template in the editor.  */ package com.something.somewhere; /**  *  * @author GFrick  */ public...

I was browser my Google reader feed and a great site popped up. I've checked it out and once I get my work bench set up and get back to my robot; I'll definitely be ordering some things from here. I wanted to spread the word about the site: http://www.inmojo.com/ They have lots of RFID, Robotics and just Arduino stuff that I think would be cool to play with. I hope to get a full post up soon.

I had a bit of trouble installing the JDK via the shell; but I eventually figured it out. Seems a large part of the problem was differences in 64 vs 32 bit Ubuntu. I wanted to use the apt-add-repository, but had to figure out that it requires some python libs. Here are the simply steps if you have been looking: sudo apt-get install  python-software-properties sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jdk After that, you should have javac/etc.

Work has begun on my third Arduino Robot. I decided that after some comments I read in various forums, that making a line following robot would probably be a proper increase in challenge. With research in hand, I placed my orders for parts and began looking into creating a test track. Here are the goals for Arduino Robot 3 - Line Following Tank: Conform to Robo Games Line Following Rules (2010)   Use only a single sensor. Robot should move in a smooth motion (no twitching about the line) I have begun the physical build, but I'm still looking into a 'practice arena'; I may end up taping together printer paper... Full report, code and video upon completion (so check back here). Edit: The reason for the single sensor goal is because someone trying to do similar with a Lego robotics set would only have one sensor. I do not want to be putting more money/hardware into any of the robots. They should be a challenge; and with my programming background I think that even two s...

My second robot was a bit more complex and ended up taking twice as long to build as originally intended. The budget changed, the designed changed, and my understanding of Robotics in general changed. The second robot is an attempt to make an obstacle avoidance robot that isn't overly simple. I will be outlining the goals, budget, build and code for Wandering Tank. The goals for Wandering Tank were simple: Should be able to scan an area in front of itself. Should be able to avoid not only walls, but obstacles. Avoid random decision making; the robot should use information when avoiding. Wandering tank meets these goals, and also looks pretty cool doing it. The code for the robot will show how the third goal is met and the other two will be obvious in the video. The budget for Wandering Tank was quite cheap. Since I started with Robot 1, the only additional cost for Wandering was the sensor and the servo. Robot 1 ($98.00) Sensor - Digital Distance Sensor 10cm $6.95 + $2.00...

Work has been coming along well on the development of the second version of Arduino Robot. There have been multiple set backs; the biggest of which is my purchase of a continuous rotation servo instead of a normal one. Otherwise the bot is constructed and mostly works in tests. The goals for Robot 2 were a step up from Robot 1: Ability to continually scan in front of itself. Ability to back and turn to avoid obstacles. Smoother movement. Basically Robot 2 is a wandering avoidance robot; called Arduino Robot 2 - Wandering Tank. For this to work, I needed some type of affordable sensor to place at the front of the robot; and from there the ability to look around with it. My solution was to mount a sensor on a servo. The servo would be used to sweep across a selected field of vision looking for possible collisions. So Wandering Tank has to do the following: Move Forward Scan left to right Move backwards while object detected Turn after object no longer detected  Repeat...