Jim’s all over the map blog

At the recent NASA Regolith Excavation Challenge, one of the other teams used a LASER rangefinder on their robot to map the sandbox and obstacles. I had never really looked in to these things before, so did some web searching. It turns out that different versions of LRF’s are readily available, but the price tag ranges from $1000 to $5000+.

I thought that there might be a cheap way to make some sort of crude rangefinder using some Sharp IR distance sensors and a hobby servo…

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I have just started playing around with the uC/OS-II RTOS written by Jean Labrosse, and hosted at Micrium. The best thing to do is buy the book he wrote, and it comes with a CD ROM with source code. However, you will also want to download the latest version from the web site, but you still need the book.

We all know that you need some sort of project as an excuse for trying out new code, but unfortunately, I don’t have such a project. This means that I am simply flailing around with some sort of hello world program for now.

I am currently working to get it running on the Atmel AVR family of processors. The OS takes a fair amount of RAM, so the Tiny chips are out. I will talk more about what I am trying to cram into a Tiny13 elsewhere in another post.