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Calculator Community => Other Calculators => Topic started by: Matrefeytontias on February 15, 2013, 04:14:23 pm

Title: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Matrefeytontias on February 15, 2013, 04:14:23 pm
Heya guys !

Five months earlier, our engineering sciences professors asked us to think of a project we'll have 5 months to finish. Two friends and me came with a crazy idea : manipulating a wireless robot with a Ti-83+ ! (well, in fact they had the idea of the robot, and me the idea of the calc, it made the thing a pretty crazy project ;D)

And now it's done ! Well, not entirely, it still needs some aesthetic things, but it's fully usable and transportable ! :thumbsup:

Here's a video I made of the whole thing working. (http://mattias.refeyton.fr/espace-ti/calcRobot.avi) Never mind the sound, it's only my family, well, living ;D

As you (barely) can see on the video, the robot is powered by eight 1.5V batteries, and the remote by a big 9V battery. The whole project uses 5 Arduino boards : two Arduinos Uno, one for the robot and the other for the remote, one Arduino Motor Shield to command the motors (as you can guess with the name), and two Arduino XBee shields (XBee is a radio protocol), for the remote and the robot to communicate with each other.

The things I had to write was a link protocol (kind of) for the calc to communicate with the Arduino of the remote, an Arduino program to send the command received from the calc to the other Arduino using the XBee shield, and another Arduino program to receive the command and manipulate the motors accordingly (my classmates made it as a very first introduction to programming, even if I took care of the receive stuffs). I had a reaaaally hard time making the XBee transmission work (almost a month with 4 hours of class work per week, and many more at home), so my classmates had all the time for building the robot ;D

Share comments ;)
Title: Re: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Sorunome on February 15, 2013, 06:52:01 pm
That is pretty insane O.O
I like it that you use the calculator :P
You should make it display stuff thought, just to make it look cooler >.<
Title: Re: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Matrefeytontias on February 15, 2013, 07:40:23 pm
Yeah, but the driver is the easiest thing to modify in the whole project, so I kept it for the end.
Title: Re: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Loulou 54 on February 16, 2013, 05:25:36 am
Congratulations ! So you made your own transmission protocol to control the radio emitter or you used the original serial stuff of the calc ? Did you program the calc in Axe or ASM ?
Title: Re: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Matrefeytontias on February 16, 2013, 05:35:51 am
I wrote the driver in ASM, I wanted to implement my own "protocol", which in fact is not really one : I just constantly send a command, which is a 2-bits number, through the port to the Arduino ; then this latter checks two of its pins to retrieve the command.
Title: Re: [School project completed] A wireless robot commanded by ... a Ti-83+ !
Post by: Sorunome on February 16, 2013, 02:36:19 pm
Maybe you should make the calculator only send changes in direction.