sorry closest thing I had in program to peizo device. only used to indicate float down anyways so can be omitted. Pin 1 is top left

quote:

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Originally posted by NMO:


Also in the works is an automated weapons control system ie sense the presence of another bot and fire weapon. May not be that useful in a fight but will be damn cool.

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quote:

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If I remember correctly Suicidal Tendances had a spear triggered by ultrasonics.

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101 had infra-red sensors for the weapon but a robot that does use ultrasonic sensors to fire a flipper is Hexy Jr built by team Whoopass. Check out the testing videos here: http://www.teamwhoopass.com/BattleBots/Bots/HexyJr/Construction/default.asp?Page=8
I like it. It helps when your robot is facing away from you.
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I was thinking of using IR to detect, it seams fairly simple. my only worry is the IR present in the areana lights. I have a couple of ways to fix that, 38Khz encoding, or detect the ambient ir and subtract that from the fire value or something.

modulation is supposedly the way to go when it comes to ignoring ambient IR sources..

Not that I know from personal experience, but I have read a few application notes and that seems to be the solution they all suggest.
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most off the shelf IR transmitter / receiver modules are 38KHz modulated / demodulated already, so they're pretty easy to use
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Unfortunetly the issue I see with 38khz modules is that they have a range of a few meters, hence they would probably bounce off the areana walls and tell the bot that there is something there all the time.

Mount the Tx and Rx modules at an angle to each other, down a tube (like on the bottom of an optical mouse), and that should reduce its ability to pickup reflected IR from any source.
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Soem interesting info on Infra-Red Object detection using PicAxe's was found here by Mel.
http://www.phanderson.com/picaxe/ir_1.html

Hope it proves useful to you Neweyn and other MicroCoders
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Great stuff!!! Just what I've been looking for. I had wondered weather it was possible to use the same micro to do the detection. I remember at TAFE when we had to make an ultrasonic tape measure in micro's class that we could use the same micro but the issue I see is the massive speed difference between the speed of sound and the speed of light anyways thanks brett and mel, that is well worth checking out.

In other news Mat and I did some range testing yesterday of the floating failsafe's.

Details so far you need one failsafe board per channel as the picaxe 08M has an issue that it cannnot drive 2 servo channels (both channels go stuttery if you try) seams to be an issue with an internal timer in the picaxe

The board takes 2.2 seconds to failsafe I hope that is not to long.

We had the bot in my garage which in theory at least should work as a faraday sheild and the floating failsafe boards gave around another 4 - 5 meters range.

Sheilding of the servo leads and micro board is very important or the micro ends up feeding even more noise into the system.

Possible upgrades would include opto isolation for the receiver.

Well it's been a buisy couple of weeks and I haven't had any time for robots. However I did get some time to write some more failsafe code.

The issue with the origional code was that at 4Mhz it took 0.65 seconds for it to return a value when the receiver was turned off (pulsin timeout)

I had previously tried to write code at 8Mhz but the servo command does not work

I've written a simple floating failsafe that will allow any good pulse through and will failsafe after 3 bad pulses and will test it today.

3 bad pulses * 0.32Seconds is 0.96 seconds to failsafe, much more acceptable.

So hear is TNP's new weapon...

http://robowars.org/forum/album_pic.php?pic_id=1166


Hopefully I'll be able to work out an effective way to protect the belt from scoopy's saw!!!

I need to find a slightly stronger and shorter spring to tention the belt, but other than that it's finished.

oh and all at 12.9 KG's total robot weight.

Brisbane hear we come!!!

very nice whered you get the pulleys?
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(about 5 min's from my place) they also did the machining work on the pulley that's on the magna motor.