Boe-Bot infrared eyes
Monday 30th June, 2008 | 11:51 amThe internet was off all weekend, made even more annoying by a) their customer service lines were also closed all weekend and b) it came back online first thing this morning meaning when they got into the office and saw the problem, a simple remote equipment reset or similar fixed it in a matter of seconds 
Still, least it’s working now. It gave me a chance to play with using IR detectors on the Boe-Bot to act as eyes for navigating which was pretty cool:
As opposed to using the wire ‘whiskers’ which have to physically touch an object before then backing up and moving away, and the light-sensitive photoresistors which weren’t really useful for navigating around objects at any great speed, using the IR sensors allowed it to continually send out pulses to detect objects and then react to them before they became an obstacle. This allowed much faster movement through a small maze (another USPS-sponsored event!):
Alt video for blocked YouTube access
I also set it up using basic code for a sumobot where it would lock onto an object and try to follow. Mia was not impressed! I was though, as it was able to successfully track a very fast moving dog 
Posting your comment...
Iain Foulds, 25 years old. Originally from England, now living in Bethel, Alaska where I work as a systems analyst for the school district. I've been involved in a number of open source projects for many years and used to produce two major music podcasts.
2 Responses to “Boe-Bot infrared eyes”
United States | Internet Explorer 6.0 | Windows XP
October 24th, 2008 at 5:04 am
that was imazing ..
can you post the code please..??..
best regards..
United States | Mozilla Firefox 3.0.3 | Mac OS X
October 24th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I think this was it. Basically right out the Parallax book (formatting isn’t too good in the comments section for code, sorry):
‘ Robotics with the Boe-Bot - FastIRRoaming.bs2
‘ Higher performance IR object detection assisted navigation
‘ {$STAMP BS2}
‘ {$PBASIC 2.5}
‘ Variables
irDetectLeft VAR BIT
irDetectRight VAR BIT
pulseLeft VAR WORD
pulseRight VAR WORD
‘ Signal program start/reset
FREQOUT 4, 1000, 3000
‘ Main routine
DO
FREQOUT 8, 1, 38500
irDetectLeft = IN9
FREQOUT 2, 1, 38500
irDetectRight = IN0
IF (irDetectLeft = 0) AND (irDetectRight = 0) THEN
pulseLeft = 650
pulseRight = 650
HIGH 1
HIGH 10
ELSEIF (irDetectLeft = 0) THEN
pulseLeft = 850
pulseRight = 850
HIGH 10
LOW 1
ELSEIF (irDetectRight = 0) THEN
pulseLeft = 650
pulseRight = 650
HIGH 1
LOW 10
ELSE
pulseLeft = 823
pulseRight = 650
LOW 1
LOW 10
ENDIF
PULSOUT 13,pulseLeft
PULSOUT 12,pulseRight
PAUSE 15
LOOP