Avoiding obstacles

To use more of Elektor Proton's capabilities, I started writing a slightly more complex program. It makes the robot follow a line, while moving cans on its path out of its way. Here is a video.

Following a line

After that, I made a small program in Flowcode to make Proton follow a line. This was quite easy to program, but it took me a while to understand that I needed to turn down the robot's speed to make it follow the line smoothly. At full speed, it would simply rush over the line before any course corrections can be made.

Motor test

I decided to extend my first program to test Proton's motors. This was slightly more difficult, because of the I2C protocol, which I had never used before. This is a video snippet of Proton using both motors to make a circular movement.

RGB Eyes

I've been programming Elektor Proton's RGB eyes to test its functionality. This was the first program I wrote for this robot.

This is a picture of the first fully functional Proton robot as it will be shipped. We are waiting for a few last components to come in, but we will have stock before the end of june 2011.

New Gripper

This picture clearly shows that the proton also has a real usefull functionality...

We experimented a lot with different grippers, but at the end we have decided to make our own custom gripper. The photo shows the frirst working prototype of this new gripper. The white plastic pieces will be produced in the same red colour as the rest of the proton robot.

Blue LCD

Hi,

The BLUE lcd was not ready in time for all the pictures, so they still show a green LCD, but this is how the LCD, that you will receive with the Proton, will look. Nice isn't it?