A little History

 

3 years ago I started on this robot project. originally it was intended to be fully analog with no microcontrollers but I had issues with timing and sequencing everything together and since it was not programmed I was unable to fix it. Later I added a microcontroller to teach myself c programming.

 

Hardware

 

Since then I have made two new versions and it is due for one last revision before I can call it done. It was meant to be a platform with everything integrated so you didn't need a chassis, extra boards, sensors etc to buy or mount. The main board has an 8-bit microcontroller, It is a PIC16F1526. There is an accelerometer, light sensors, speaker, microphone, IR object detectors, antenna feelers a capacitive touch sensor, 6 serial addressable Led, 18650 lithium battery with boost switching power supply. There were edge detectors but

I will be removing them because they interfered with the object detection. I will be creating daughter boards that will bring back edge detect function. I plan on adding more capacitive touch sensors because I was really pleased with how they worked. I have added also comparators so that some of the analog sensors can have thresholds that trigger and link to an interrupt pin on the micro. The accelerometer, sound and object sensors can cause an interrupt.

 

Behavior

 

This part is still under development too and I am a novice programmer, Right now I am just creating test programs to test each individual hardware aspect. Later when I get this stuff done I will bring it all together into a fully functional autonomous bot. 

I would really love to implement some learning behavior even something simple. Some rudimentary area mapping and the ability for it to survive on its own eventually via self-charging and power conservation. I would like ti to be able to sleep at night and wake itself up in the morning and actively seeking out sunlight to charge during the day.  I am willing to share all code schematics and design aspects to anyone who may be interested in any reason. I would be amazing to get someone with more knowledge of programming with PICs to help out. Below are pictures of the current and past revisions, more info will be added from time to time.