Freescale Semiconductor's two-legged robot (FSLBOT) and a controller board lets engineers, students, and even hobbyists experiment with the robot's four servos and many sensors. Under software control, the robot will move and respond to touch, motion, vibration, tilt, and other external stimuli, depending on the sensors attached to it.
The four servos let the robot tilt over a bit on one foot and then rotate on that leg. Then when the robot moves back to the vertical position, software repeats the process on the other leg. Thus, the robot "walks" across a surface. Four AA batteries underneath the TWR-MECH controller board provide power, and the board's 32-bit MCF52259 ColdFire MCU handles the sensor inputs and servo-control PWM outputs.
Freescale Semiconductor's 2-legged robot (FSLBOT) and controller board lets engineers, students, and even hobbyists experiment with the robot's four servos and many sensors. (Source: Freescale)
Users can add four more servos if they want to position sensors, actuate a home-made grabber, or do something else. The TWR-MECH board will work in a Freescale Tower "stack," and its position on the robot lets you add other Tower-compatible boards above it. Add-on boards provide analog-to-digital converters, displays, keyboards, Ethernet, wireless communications, and so on.
A robot costs $199 and comes with a dialect of BASIC provided by CPUStick. Before you say, "Good grief, not BASIC," let me explain. Programmers use a PC as a terminal to write code that uses the StickOS editor, compiler, debugger, and memory "flasher" already installed in the robot. I have a robot so I can put it through some tests and then report on my experiences in another Mechatronics Zone blog entry. Of course, if you don't like BASIC, you can use Freescale's CodeWarrior tools to program the MCU in C/C++.
Jon, this looks way cool! With all of the discussion on STEM this looks like it would be a great addition to any school program. I used to teach a robotics club at my son's middle school - this guy would have been perfect and the price is right! I'll be very interested in learning about your experiences with it. I am of the same BASIC era with the TI99/4A - Any programming language is worthwhile in teaching students what programming is about and this should be a great starting point to get folks excited about robotics, sensors and programming in general! Thanks for sharing!
Jon, thanks for reporting this. This looks like yet another way to get more people involved in designing or programming robots and the technology used in them, along with the open-source projects I've reported on: http://www.designnews.com/author.asp?section_id=1392&doc_id=240629 http://www.designnews.com/document.asp?doc_id=239419
I had problems with the PC setup but they stemmed from PC memory chips that had gone bad. Set up on my Macintosh took a bit of time because I don't use the Mac for lab work and don't often use the command-line interface in the Mac's terminal window. The Mac required no additional USB drivers, but I did have to determine which USB device corresponded to the robot. From the terminal window I issues the command:
ls -l /dev/tty.usbmodem*
Which returned:
/dev/tty.usbmodem1d151
that identified the only USB "modem;" the robot. Then I could connect to the robot with this command:
screen /dev/tty.usbmodem1d151
The robot responded with:
Welcome to StickOS for Freescale MCF52252 v1.90g! Copyright (c) 2008-2010; all rights reserved. http://www.cpustick.com support@cpustick.com (checksum 0x6eff)
Jon,I saw this on the Freescale site while looking at some sensors for a project. I have their compass kit, and it is really nice. I expect that this will be just as good. Thanks for the informative description.
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