Arduino VEX

No, I am not dead. And neither is this blog. Yes, there has been a lull in the action lately; OK, for a long time. A friend once told me that "That work junk sure gets in the way of a lot of stuff!" He was right. Work has been overwhelming lately. I won't go into details as that is out of scope for this blog, but work has sapped my creative juices for many months now. I put some big issues to bed and hopefully can do some creative things now.

I would like to thank you for reading my post. I hope to post more often in the future.

Last fall the Dallas Personal Robotics Group (dprg.org) visited Innovation First International( http://www.innovationfirst.com/ ). makers of the VEX Robotics Design System ( http://www.vexrobotics.com/ ).  We were treated to an outstanding tour of the facility, met the executives and were generally wowed and overwhelmed. The IFI folks were kind enough to hand out some valuable  kits as we left. It was my understanding that we (the DPRG folks) were to take the kits and stress them somewhat. It seems that the kids in competition won't stress the kits. It would appear that stressing a kit to the point of failure would keep a school VEX team out of competition, so I can see why they don't do it. Our competitions are different, without so much on the line, so IFI has asked us for some stress testing.

I am getting to an Arduino tie-in here...

In particular, the IFI guys were interested in VEX robots running on some other processors, including Arduino. As I am one of "the Arduino guys", I received a VEX Protobot kit. This solves a major problem for me in that I find the programming kind of easy, but the engineering is problematic for me. With a rolling platform in kit form, the hard work (for me) is done. All I have to do is wire it up and program it. Right.

So, the project needs a name. VEX-duino? Maybe not.

I used the Protobot kit to build the tumbler chassis. It is a steel chassis with four servo motors driving four wheels. It was a simple enough kit to assemble. I will cover more as I move along, but the robot is a tumbler with an Arduino microcontroller and the first task will be to build it for competition in the "Square Dance" event for RoboRama 2011a- a twice-yearly event offered by DPRG. Rules are here: https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1NqZZQ4MnlD9Y1EGsEvkvKFXNPVXpH45YAd_l338y-3o&pli=1

More on this project later.

Once again- thanks for reading!

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