A little teaser

Archive
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A little teaser if something coming at VSLive next week, thatConference the week after, and HDC keynote in September. Surprisingly, I get to talk about NETMF in all three :slight_smile:

So, a little taserā€¦I mean teaserā€¦ promise! Really, I would never hurt people. muah hahahaha :wink:

Pete

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Is that the chassis Andrew had at MADExpo? I forgot where he got it from. Was a really good deal if I remember right.

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Yeah, that looks like the Magician chassis from Sparkfun:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10825

$15. Itā€™s a steal, for a simple robot platform. No frills, but a nice starting point.

@ Pete, are you going to have a build-it blog post and parts list at some point?

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So, what magic does this robot has in it?

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What? You mean that two mounting layers, two motors, two wheels, a ball caster, and a battery pack all for $15 isnā€™t sufficiently magical for you? :wink:

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Oh, it is magical for sure :). I was referring to additional magic that Pete put in it. Hard to say from the static image (beside the obvious that Pete is on the Cyberdyneā€™s payroll) :wink:

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Looks like Cerbuino Bee with one of these:

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10822?

plus, perhaps, an HD44780 module driving the LCD screen.

The module in the front appears to be this one:

http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/344

which seems a little odd for a robot, but Iā€™m sure Peteā€™s doing something interesting with it.

Thatā€™s all thatā€™s visible in the picture. Wouldnā€™t surprise me if Pete has other goodies hidden on the lower layer of the mounting platform.

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Nice! Exactly what cerbuino is designed to do. Canā€™t wait to see it dancing.

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Pete - perchance did you write a nice little wrapper class for the RN-XV command set? I have one I havenā€™t tried on the Bee yet.

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Yeah, canā€™t wait to get that peice of code :slight_smile:

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Iā€™ve got a buck that says it plays trance music via midi and likely uses sound reflection analysis to determine its path to find key members of the human resistance in order to direct terminator units to them.

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That SparkFun chassis is fun and dirt cheap. The motors are crap and no good for anything precise, but for $15, you can build all sorts of simple robots and not cry too much if you melt something. I bought 4 of those kits, two cerbuino bees, two of the RN-XV WiFi modules from Roving Networks (those are excellent, btw) and two motor controllers. Iā€™ll probably have two robots built (and possibly running) side x side, although I just realized I have only the one display.

Interfacing with the RN-XV took almost no effort on my part because of the great work on the driver by Stefan Thoolen (a frequent contributor in the Netduino community). The driver works with (and was likely designed for) the Netduino, but the 4.2 DLLs in the latest commit worked unchanged on the Cerbuino Bee, because the xbee socket is just a COM port. Itā€™s great to see portable code. To connect, itā€™s just two lines:

_wifi.EnableDHCP();
_wifi.JoinNetwork(ā€œ(my ssid)ā€, 0, WiFlyGSX.AuthMode.WPA2_PSK, ā€œ(my wpa key)ā€);

http://netmftoolbox.codeplex.com/SourceControl/list/changesets

Iā€™ll do a build-up blog post after the events. I need to give them a little something extra for coming. Iā€™ll give this much of a hint: this little guy will feature in my NETMF talks and my Windows 8 Metro talks :slight_smile:

The temp sensor is just a random sensor I had hanging around. Not sure what Iā€™ll put on the front, but I wanted it to sense something and report back data. An air quality sensor could get me in trouble.

Oh, and the world will be over soon. I have an IP address and can ping the robot. :slight_smile:

Going to pick up an inexpensive WiFi router this week so I can have complete control over the setup.

@ Duke great idea! I should totally do that

Pete