retrointerfacing

Today this tiny crawler took his first steps! This robot uses 5 small-size RC servo’s and is controlled by a small custom microcontrollerboard using an Atmel ATmega8. This controller board is very minimalistic. No power supply regulator, no crystal, just the controller, some capacitors and pcb edge connectors for directly connecting the servo flat cables. Here are the C sources (winavr): tinywalker.zip

See him in action on youtube

More on the used micrcontrollerboard can be found on the mublock-pages. In case you’re interested, I have had a large batch of these boards made, so they are very cheap

More details on the mechanics. The frame has been made from the cover of a discarded CD-ROM drive. The frame had been cut using metal scissors. Bras tubes have been soldered to the frame in order to form the middle joint.

The whiskers are made from guitar string, mounted to paper-detect switches that had a previous life in a fax machine.

The mublock microcontrollerboard uses a bootloader, similar to the arduino but smaller. In order to pre-program this bootloader, the atmel AVR-ISP interface is present on the board too. It is a 6 pin edge connector. In order to connect with the AVR-ISP dongle, you could simply solder flatcable on and take it off afterwards. A better solution can be made from contact springs from an ethernet-connector, soldered to a 6pin micromatch connector. While uploading the bootloader you can simply press this programmer on the board.