[17] Robot Controllers

Please DO NOT send administrative things to the main mailing list address, as then everyone will get annoyed.

Pricing for the new mini-board is as follows:

1 board only ................. $ 10.00

2 to 9 boards ................ 7.50 ea.

10 to 50 boards .............. 6.25 ea.

50 and over .................. 5.00 ea.

$500 5%

$1000 10%

$2500 15%

$5000 20%

Three individuals are independent suppliers of the Mini Board:

• Gregory Ratcliff , 1763 Hess Boulevard, Columbus, Ohio 43212; (614) 487-0695 Greg sells blank boards for $6, parts kits, and assembled boards. Please contact him for information. You can also send him an order directly.

  Make checks out to The Progressive Solution and mail them to him at 1763 Hess Boulevard, Columbus, Ohio 43212; call him at (614) 487-0695 for more information.

  $66.00 Parts kit of all parts that mount on the PCB, less PCB (see above). Assembled boards will also continue to be available....

  $82.00 Assembled and Tested with DLM 2.0 downloaded (we need that in to test...of course you could overwrite the dlm)

  $2.00 Fred's 45 page document set...only with board order.

  Shipping in the USA: $3.00 per order... regardless of quantity. Delivery is based upon demand.

• Mark Reeves 1117 Braemar Court, Cary, NC 27511; BBS and voice (919) 481-3170 (voice hours from 5-7 pm EST).

  Shipping - all orders will be shipped ASAP, we do not need to wait for a certain number of orders (although there may be delays while certain parts are gotten). If a delay happens you will be notified by email or postcard. No check or MO will be cashed until the order is ready to ship.

  Prices (subject to change without notice) All kits include a PCB, a kit without a PCB will be $5.00 less. A kit without the 1 RJ11 adpt will be $2.50 less, a kit without the 3 RJ11 adpt will be $5.00 less.

  K0 - a super basic kit, does not include any RS232 stuff, or motor drive items, inductors, or most of the other discrete components, it does have a PCB, CPU, socket, one 36 pin header, and a few other items. Good for TTL level RS232, via some other chip, for the person wants to use the board for expansion purposes, or whatever. Contact us for price.

  • K1 - basic kit all parts needed to get a board up and going, one RJ11 jack, no headers, for the true hobby person $41.00
  • K2 - same as above, but has all header connectors (3 female, 2 male - 36 pin header connectors) $46.50
  • K3 - basic + motor controller the full kit with all needed parts, with all LED's and motor controller chips, one RJ11 jack $57.50
  • K4 - full kit same as K3, but has the 3 RJ11 jacks for interconnecting with other boards $60.00
  • B1 - bare PCB board, double sided, extended version silk screened parts location, etc. $5.00
  • J1 - a DC power jack and power switch for the board. Use if the screw power connector is not used; this would work with a plug in power supply. Note- these items are sold at cost, they are not cheap $6.50

  Assembled Kits
  Add $25 to any kit to get it built, add an B to the kit number, i.e. K4-B or K4-B-A for the 68hc11A1 version of the kit. All assembled boards will have all parts soldered on them, but to meet FCC requirements there will be minor work to be done ( you have to install on chip)

  NOTE: the basic kits do NOT include the motor controller chips or the motor LED's, they do have the RS232 parts, they are for people who want to use the board for things other than robotics. No speaker or sensors are included. All motor controller chips are the TI version, 1A drive current. All prices are subject to change without notice; please e-mail to check if prices have gone up or down since this posting.

  Mark is a supplier of the recent board revision called the "Mini Board 2.0 Extended." This version of the Mini Board includes a power switch and DC power jack for ease of use. Please see the file pub/miniboard/mbextend.txt for more information.

• CW Technology, Wally Blackburn
  Miniboard 2.1 Extended Kit: $84US
  Miniboard 2.1 Extended Assembled/Tested: $109US NOTE TO INSTITUTIONS: Any order to a school, company, or any other large institution will ONLY be shipped via FedEx at an additional $10US. This is to avoid the "lost in the receiving department syndrome" that often occurs in these institutions.

  Send orders to: CW Technology, 7328 Timbercreek Court, Reynoldsburg, OH 43068-1181. COD orders can be sent via e-mail or by calling 800-547-7479.

The Handy Board is the latest in a series of boards released under MIT's free licensing policy, in which the printed circuit board artwork, schematics, and driver software may be freely licensed for personal, educational, and commercial use. Past designs disseminated under this policy include the 6.270 Robot Controller System and the Mini Board.

Handy Board kits and assembled systems are distributed by Gleason Research (gleason@tiac.net, 617-641-2551), CW Technology (cwtech@infinet.com, 800-547-7479), and Digital Micro Systems (dutta.4@osu.edu, 614-299-2566). Blank printed circuit boards are sold by Douglas Electronics (info@douglas.com, 510-483-8770).

Fred Martin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Media Laboratory, is the creator of the Handy Board. Dr. Martin is presently writing a textbook for an undergraduate engineering course based on mobile robotics project work. The text (working title, The Art of Engineering by Robotics) will make extensive use of the Handy Board, and is scheduled for publication in late 1996 by Addison-Wesley.

For more information, contact one of the distributors, or see the Handy Board home page on the World-Wide Web: http://el.www.media.mit.edu/groups/el/projects/handy-board

[17.5] Other Robot Controllers

• The main board is based on a 68hc11 running in external mode with 32K ram and 32K ROM. The ROM contains the Buffalo monitor (with a assembler/dissasembler added), plus a module called ROBOTMON which is a menu driven exerciser for all functions (including motors, sonars, steppers, servos), a ROBOT.UTL module which contains a number of routines for converting input data from dec/hex and output routines for displaying data in various formats (e.g decimal, hex, binary, etc.), and ROBOT.INT provides all of the interrupt routines for 2 channels of PWM. a 10 msec TOK_COUNT, IC routines to measure wheel encoder speed and sonar elapsed time.

  The unique feature of this system is the addition of an 8 bit memory mapped bi-directional port This allows you to talk directly to any one of 16 slaves and send/receive data from them. The data is latched into the slaves which allows the slaves to operate autonomously without further main board intervention. Each slave has jumpers to set the board type to 0-15 and the slave channel address 0-15.

• A motor control slave that uses a LM298 (2 amps continuous, 5 amps max with thermal shut-down) H-bridge for driving 2 motors with PWM from OC2,3. provision for bi-phase encoder input via IC1,2
• A sonar slave using the Polaroid 6500 module multiplexed to up to 8 transducers. The amplitude of the returned energy is also available through AD0 (this from a capture and hold circuit which can be read to determine the energy vector). Range is reported in 0.01 ft. units from 0.5 to 32.00 ft.
• A stepper control slave that allows simultaneous stepper of up to 4 stepper motors. Either uni-pole or bi-polar (i.e. 4 or 6 wire stepper). Uses SAA1042 (500 milli-amp max) drivers with Full/Half step and direction independent for each stepper.
• A prototype slave that provides the interface logic to the 34 pin bus and a 4x4" prototyping area. New designs can be easily protyped. Jumper settable board address as well as slave channel 0-15 allow multiple prototype boards to be used to implement whatever devices you wish.
• A super prototype slave that has its own 68HC11 running in internal mode. This allows commands to be sent to the slave MCU and control to proceed totally in parallel with anything the other slaves/main board are doing. Slave has races for implementing an 8 servo control logic. The main board merely selects servo 0-7 and then sends 0-255 value (represents 4 micro-second resolution) to control the servo with pulses from 1-2 msec. Detailed information and price lists may be obtained from :
  Jerry Burton

  net: jbpir2@aol.com or rssc@netcom.com

  10471 S. Brookhurst St.

  Anaheim, CA 92804

  tel: 714.535.8161

  fax: 714.535.6629

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  Last-Modified: Wed Oct 23 13:22:08 1996
  Kevin Dowling <nivek@cmu.edu>