Entrant 87 : Carl the Robot
Posted: Tue Mar 15, 2016 1:57 pmUser
carlrobotics
Description
The Goal: Was to create, design, and develop a low cost wifi remote control Educational Robot for under $20, and to help Carleton University in Ottawa Canada with a cool wifi project that they can use in their High School outreach program. The outreach students go into the local high schools and teach Programming Electronics and Design. Student can take the workshop and if they want make the Robot for under $25. This has opened up Design, Electronics, Programming and Coding options to many that could not afford such a complex project for $25. What a great chip, thank you ESP8266. We are providing all the code now and will launch the open source version of the CARL robot in Sept.
With help from M Grant we designed a PCB that would house the ESP8266 12E, and extend the IO capability by adding a SX1509 IO expander, this allowed us the option of 16 additional GPIO's or PWM using the I2C library.
To give the Robot more functions we added a ws2812 RGB , two TSOP for keypad control, and IR and LED options. In addition we added a breakout area with 8 IO's available. (see pcb picture attached)
Using the esp8266 forum we found Ivan's great arduino IDE that he made for the ESP8266 and M Grant wrote the SX1509 library, H Hertani wrote a great browser controller for the robot short video clip and Dominic P and Miguel M wrote and android app with a joy stick controller see short video clip. All this software is on the Github
Parts
ESP12
AA batteries
Carl PCB
Links
Github
Homepage
Video
Images
carlrobotics
Description
The Goal: Was to create, design, and develop a low cost wifi remote control Educational Robot for under $20, and to help Carleton University in Ottawa Canada with a cool wifi project that they can use in their High School outreach program. The outreach students go into the local high schools and teach Programming Electronics and Design. Student can take the workshop and if they want make the Robot for under $25. This has opened up Design, Electronics, Programming and Coding options to many that could not afford such a complex project for $25. What a great chip, thank you ESP8266. We are providing all the code now and will launch the open source version of the CARL robot in Sept.
With help from M Grant we designed a PCB that would house the ESP8266 12E, and extend the IO capability by adding a SX1509 IO expander, this allowed us the option of 16 additional GPIO's or PWM using the I2C library.
To give the Robot more functions we added a ws2812 RGB , two TSOP for keypad control, and IR and LED options. In addition we added a breakout area with 8 IO's available. (see pcb picture attached)
Using the esp8266 forum we found Ivan's great arduino IDE that he made for the ESP8266 and M Grant wrote the SX1509 library, H Hertani wrote a great browser controller for the robot short video clip and Dominic P and Miguel M wrote and android app with a joy stick controller see short video clip. All this software is on the Github
Parts
ESP12
AA batteries
Carl PCB
Links
Github
Homepage
Video
Images