Mr. Roboto - Microbric Viper

Back then when I was child, I have always been amazed with Robots, specially the ones like Johnny 5, from the hit movie Short Circuit and Short Circuit 2,it really spurred a lot of imagination on how nice it would be to have one as your assistant, able to do mundane and repeatable task with hight efficiency and accuracy, what's more fascinating is, it can even think and learn on its own.

Fast forward 20 years later, the time is now right to somehow make that imagination come true, well not exactly as good as the robots from that movie, but somehow take a chance of creating a robot having bits and pieces of it's capability.

So here it is...

My first venture to the world of Robotics, I'm using the Microbric Viper robotic kit, it's basically a very good starter platform, it's comes with the BasicMicro's Atom Basic 24 Pin 16F876 PICMicro Microcontroller, 2 gear motors + wheels, 3 LEDs, IR receiver module, piezo buzzer, 2 touch-sensors, a Line-following sensor module, slideswitch, touch button switch, and an IR Remote. This enough to get me started building my first autonomous, environment-sensing robot. The beauty of it all is it can be program using the MBASIC, powerfull version of BASIC for the microcontroller.


Here is the main circuit board



Here are some photos of it taken when I started working with it.

Setting-up the serial connections to the laptop so that the MicroBasic compiled program can be downloaded to the Viper robot main circuit board. The good thing about flash-based micro-controller is that you don't need a hardware to program the chip. The programming is flush out and flush in to the chip via serial port connection.


Loading up the test program, this is just very simple program, just make the red LEDs blink that was connected to main board. ('it's Alive! Masta!)





After the loading the test program, it's time to connect the modules to the mainboard, for this activity, i'm trying to build the Bumper bot.






Bumpber Bot

Here is the completed Viper Bumper Robot, this is programmed to roam autonomously and senses it's way by the two(2) touch sensors connected on the bumper, once it hits an obstacle depending on which bumper is activated, it will back-off and turn left or right to change direction, then moves forward.

I will be posting updates such as video and build notes as I continue to build my robot.