> ChrisMcDonald

Chris McDonald is a Telecommunications Engineering Technology Student at The College of the North Atlantic. He is building a mobile telerobot with two other students as a thesis project. The design is very simlar to the prototype.

My Droid

[WWW]UnnamedMobileTeleRobot

Update

We never did really name that last telerobot, we just called it the robot. Anyway parts didn't show up and we had to slap together a platform from the way undersized motors and gear boxes I had in my junk box. It could move with the batteries onboard but it couldn't turn. We ended up going with a power teather for the presentation.

Now two years later I've finaly got some time to rebuild the robot. This time around I've built a custom platform with a pair of windsheild wiper motors. It runs ok from the l298 controler, though it gets alittle hot.

I've added a linksys WAP54g wireless access point running OpenWRT in client mode. It has two ttl level serial ports and an ethernet port. If I can find a nice little ethernet device to stream the webcam I'll be able to drop the heavy and power hungery laptop motherboard. I'm thinking a NSLU2 linux based USB file server might do the trick.

So far I've just mounted an OOPic and a pair of IR rangefinders on the robot to test the platform. It seems to be working ok. Now I just need to figureout how to mount the accesspoint and laptop motherboard.