Hallway following robot brains
Saturday I went to a meeting of the Robotics Society of Southern California in Fullerton, CA. I hadn’t been to a meeting before and I was expecting to see some really cool stuff since they have a hallway following robot contest coming up. Well, I was a little surprised because only two other people showed up, one other guy who had never been there before, and this guy John who is a club veteran. It wasn’t a total letdown since John had his hallway robot brains with him, so I figured I would take some pics on my phone and post them here.
The controller runs an Intel 8031 (ROM-less 8051) microprocessor with 64K of RAM. The program to control the steppers, LCD and other peripherals was burned to the 256K (I think) EPROM. The system also had an 82C55 general purpose I/O chip with three 1byte bi-directional ports. They keypad is sweet, board mounted with 12 pins, one for each key; I stopped by the electronics shop in Fullerton when I left and made sure I picked up one.
I was quite impressed with the design, I usually don’t see systems with separate RAM, storage and proc, it’s mostly microcontrollers for ease of use. The other monthly meeting for the club is usually bigger and I plan to swing up to that in two weeks. I’ll try and get some more pics of John’s completed bot and the others when the competition runs.
Obligatory Wikipedia link for the 8051 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8051
And a reference for the 82C55 - http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~plusquel/310/slides/8086_IO2.html
Robotics Society of Southern California - http://www.rssc.org/home.html
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