Wii On The Fire

NEW update 8/12/11 second video i updated the forwards and revers ,need to look for new laser 5mW +

Hi there LMR this is a project largely inspired by Gareth & CTC thank you :) ,It's a light chaser for the most part but it has a 360 viewing angle it can see all around and right next to it's self ,(side track if i put an IR LED on the robot it would know it's location relative to the light never went  down that road )   

in the pic (below) you can see the debug program i developed in Processing. The large circle is the windows of my lab about 1.5m away and 30cm up (i rotated the robot 360 buy hand ), the smaller circle is the out line of the robot , and the lines extending away from the center are 30cm long in reality ,i traced them out with a IR LED just to show me were things were in the eye of the robot   note some streaking of the image due to having the gain to high ,this has been adjusted and will need to be adjusted again (sun light)   

debug is without the tube 

(below ) My original set up . why i abandoned it, at certain angles  light wound not pass threw just reflecting off the outside of the tube also some internal reflection on the opposite side of the light  and you end up with 2 signals from 1 light. 

The second pic (on the right ) is a laser scanner well a rotating mirror ,it's a picaxe 08m2  a darlinton array, motor out of DVD player with a small mirror on top of the output shaft at a steep angle  and a `1mW laser mounted in a tube. The idea is.....?  meh i could and i also wonted to use the PWM on the Picaxe to drive a motor . The laser has a transistor and such on board  for on and off control buy setting it low = ON high = OFF  ,buy changing the PWM of the motor and the on and off rate of the laser i could change the laser projection to just a few dots or dashes of light rather than just a circle

this works fine need a more powerful  laser so the Wii cam can see it

note a 1mW laser just don't cut it when competing  with sun light

Rocket brand Wii cam  mounted vertically ,it's a shame i only have 1. the best IR sensor i have used because ,4 targets, fully adjustable in programing ,simple to use ,i2c , ied like to make a 1024 x 768 compound eye out of it ,  

How it works : kinda vaguely 

the Wii came looks up at the bubble and see's the reflection of it's surrounds and it's self ,im finding this quite hard to explain .....ummm now ok so the pitcher  the robot see's is like an over view of the world ,,if you play video games third person ,,,if you refer to the debug pitcher ,the robot is in the center, top  is forward of the robot  ,bottom  is behind and left and right is left and right of the robot   so if  the blob of light is right at top it is forward of the robot , so go forward until the blob gets to close  to the center of the pitcher were the robot is ,,,so stop or revers ,i put into the forward and revers sub's some fine left and right correction for keeping the blob centered while traveling to target or backing away that's only comes into play 50 pixels left and right of center ,beyond that i have a hard left and right tern for navigating