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