Update - CinD-LOU motorized wheelchair joystick hack

Visitor "Rich" shared some yoda advice at ( and since) last week's
meeting. Thanks Rich! With his help, we have a new and improved plan
for hacking CinD-LOU's Pride Mobility Jazzy 1122 motorized wheelchair
to put it under autonomous motion control. Taking control of the
drive wheels will enable following a line on the floor as a first
goal.

The new approach is to go into the hand-held pendant control and
mirror the manual joystick inputs by interjecting our own voltage
signals onto the same joystick wires to the controller board. Rich
has given us a test sequence. The detail investigation will start
tomorrow night to sort out the needed inputs and outputs. Interested
parties are welcome to observe, pitch in, and kibitz. It is a
learning experience.

We hope to talk with the Kinect project folks tomorrow night to get
their advice on the possibilities to rig the Kinect onto the CinD-LOU
platform. We've been researching the SparkFun's site for
possibilities to use the Honeywell HMC6352 digital compass module.
We're also looking into the Willow Garage open-source ROS (Robot
Operating System). Why just follow a line?

Finally, we hope (in the coming weeks) to have some new eye socket and
bracket part designs for the MakerBot folks to fab up for CinD-LOU's R/
C servo controlled eye motions. It would be great to demo these
working for the July 21 HIVE party.

Jim

We need laptop interaction to really take advantage of such things as Kinect. We may want to focus on line following first and get that down. But if we already have laptop integration with the line following then kinect won’ be too hard.