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I’ve long been fascinated by the concept of artificial intelligence and its application to robotics.

 

My goal was to draw something in a CAD program, import it into Mach 3, and let the machine move through its paces to see if anything fell off, went up in smoke, caught fire, etc. I've attached a (crappy Blackberry) video of one of the first few times things worked as expected.

Haven't posted anything for awhile - I've been busy building a CNC machine based on this book: Build Your Own CNC Machine (see http://buildyourcnc.com/Book.aspx for more details). The book very thoroughly describes the building techniques necessary to get up and running using the plans in the book and the suggested electronics.

Here are the basic materials I used (exact electronics specified in the book):

Well I've decided to replace my 2.4 ghz wireless camera on Ardbot with this guy:

JPEG Color Camera - UART Interface

While it isn't as capable as the video camera I had planned to use, it has the advantage of having a serial interface that can communicate with the Arduino, uses 3.3v, so my hope is to be able to stream the JPEG images via XBEE to my PC.

I noticed some extreme jerkiness between the ardbot's pan/sweep servos and any interaction with the bluetooth modem. My original code was using the Servo library that ships with the Arduino IDE. Switching to the SoftwareServo library (see http://www.arduino.cc/playground/ComponentLib/Servo) seemed to resolve the jitters....although I can't really explain why at this point.

Finally, I can send and receive messages between the ardbot and my pc, over bluetooth. This post on the Arduino forum was very helpful:

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1231650517

Bluetooth, java, Linux - seem to be working together in harmony now. Some things I learned along the way regarding the RXTX java library and Linux com ports in general:

By default, only the root user has access to read/write the serial ports on the system. So if I take the sample code from RXTX I've attached called FindPorts.java and run it from the command line with my user account it will not list any ports. This code was lifted straight from the RXTX site. I've packaged it in a jar file for ease of use from the command line: