The 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 😀