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Saturday, November 27, 2010

Lots of Minor Work

I completed a lot of minor work today.  I adjusted my bootloader.  For the initial load of the bootloader, I found it was necessary to add a dummy program to the upper region to stop the code from flowing back to the start of the bootloader.  If I didn't, the icsp program on the PC might get noise and fail to receive the start signal.  I also added a new start method on the PC end.  It waits for the start signal from the Pic, and it ignores anything else ( like bogus 0x00 from an open output on the TX line.

I cut some scrap wood for a base and taped on a ball caster in place of the electrical taped LED I was using for the back balance.  I got the ball caster in the mail today along with a few other goodies from Sparkfun.  One of the other goodies was an RS232 shifter kit.  I soldered that together.  It not only freed up a load of space on my breadboard, it also allowed me to reprogram my 'bot in circuit.  Happiness!  It is much faster than I'd ever hoped.  It has been remarkably error free, too.

I've started playing around with the Sharp IR sensor and some basic IR transmitter/receiver stuff.  I want to rewrite CDR to use the Sharp instead of the Ping ultrasound sensor.  I also want to add line following capability.

I got a pair of really small ( and probably fragile ) servos, too.  They are just fodder for some routines I want to try.  I want to write a routine that will do interrupt driven servo control.  I'll start with two or three servos.  I want to see how many servos I can control with a single Pic 16f88 at 8MHz, using a single timer1 at 1 or .5 mSec interrupts without "jitter".

I see the button to add a video here, I'll try to link in a vid I did of CDR:

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