The original intention of the FunnyRobot project is to create a low-power-consumptive wheeled robot for high school educational use.

In the mechanical part, I assembled the chassis of the robot using waste materials except for the motional mechanism. In the electronical part, the controller has gone through two major versions – version 1 and version 2, and the current version is V2.52-build200908. Funny-Robot V1.0 is a demo version that has been already found bugs and deficiencies; therefore, the development still continues, and I corrected most errors in V2.5.

The current hardware scheme adopts an ATmega128 8-bit AVR microcontroller as main processor while using an ATmega8 to actualize an open sourced USB programming solution called usbasp. Build in peripheral devices includes 4 channels of H-bridge PWM DC motor driver, 38kHz generator for inferred object detector, RS-232 serial interface, 1602 LCD, etc. SPI, USART, I2C buses are reserved for extension.

Since the purpose of the project is to create an educational robot platform, I am designing a comprehensive firmware with user-friendly interface under GNU C++ cross compiler. The current firmware scheme is based on an open sourced real-time operating system called FreeRTOS. The firmware provides APIs to operate both build-in resources (ADC, I$^2$C, SPI, etc.) and robot related utilities (LCD, DC motor, servo, etc.) A previous version of the firmware, which is based on foreground-background processing and compiled under GCC, is also available.

Sponsor: Juvenile's Activities Center of Xuhui