irisE - MachineGrid::Robots at Work

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irisE

Thursday, 30 September 2004

I named this one Iris-e,because it's the enhanced version of Iris.The following changes were made from the previous one:

instead of the parallel port,she runs on a PIC 16F84A.
included a new stepper motor board in addition to a DC motor board
includes a regulator board,sending required voltages to all the other circuit boards

Here's what the machine had to do:
Follow a line which was in the given shape. Along the line there about 8 holes made ,containing mirrors at the bottom of each of them .The mirrors were placed to detect the holes. Before the machine started ,5 balls were provided on the machine and some of the holes were covered with black paper.So the machine had to drop the balls only in the holes with the uncovered mirrors.[kind of tough to understand,if you read it again,it'll be clearer :-) ]

Circuit Boards
The circuit cards used on Iris-e are:

Microcontroller Board
Motor Driver Board
Stepper Board
Infra Red Sensor Board
Regulator Board(5v,6v,9v)

All these boards have been separately described in the "Circuit Boards" section.

Here's a brief overview of the different boards' function :

Microcontroller Board : Run by a PIC16F84a running at 10Mhz.PortA is used for the IR sensors.PortB is used for the DC drive motors and stepper motor.
Motor Driver Board : Each DC motor is driven by an L293D.The board is capable of driving 4 DC motors.
Stepper Driver Board: The stepper motor is driven by a ULN2803.This boad can drive 2 stepper motors.
Infrared Sensor Board: The IR sensor board is designed to handle 4 sensors. An LM324 comparator handles the signal conditioning so that the microcontroller receives clean "0"s and "1"s.The circuit used is detailed in the "Circuit Boards" section
Regulator Board: You could call it iris's power distributor. Just needed a main 12V DC supply to it.It distribited 5V,6V and 9V to the other boards.

Sensor Layout
The sensor layout is quite simple.

Two sensors at the bottom front are used to detect the line.
One sensor in front of the machine to detect the holes.

Ball Dropping Mechanism

This consisted of 2 PVC pipes.One part of the pipe is used to hold the balls,the other pat to channel the balls into the holes.
A stepper motor is used to drop and stop the balls into the holes on receiving signals from the microcontroller.

Drive system
The Drive system is similar to iris. 2 geared motors on each side give iris-e a Battle Tank kind of steering and drive.This is helpful as this gave her a minimum turning radius.The gears are in a 1:1 ratio ,transferring power to both wheels on each side.The gears were obtained from Aries Incorporation.

Code
Well...my PC decided to give up on me one day..and i lost quite alot of stuff including iris-e's code.The code was in assembly.I used MPASM from the MPLAB suite to assemble it.

Qusetions?If you got any questions.please feel free to message me.You can use the "Contact Me" page or mail me at gerryseq(at)rediffmail.com .

{moscomment}

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