Anyway, I’ll post again once  I have the things properly tested and I’ve spoken to the people of IEArobotics. For now, here is the link to download Wiilson if you want to try it out.

As mentioned earlier, it is just a PWM Wiimote implementation to control a Skybot. The Wiimote is interfaced thanks to the excellent pywii library, Orienting the Wiimote makes the bot move and it goes faster or slower depending on the inclination of the controller. Changing from mode ‘A’ to ‘B’ (or ’1′ to ’2′) overrides this behavior and controls the bot with the direction keys of the Wiimote, being able to alter speeds with the ‘Plus’ and ‘Minus’ buttons. It’s not pretty, but it is a quick hack and works fine. If you want something better you’ll have to wait for the release of pybot, a Python module to control (extended) libStargate managed robots with PWM support. The only class present right now is to control the Skybot as it is out of the box, so PWM support is software based -you’d have to rewire it if you wanted a hardware version of this, much better but totally out of the scope-.

Coming up soon, at least as soon as our bot gets de-cannibalized if that is even a word!

By the way… I think I’m getting to love this stuff. I’ll have to buy a Skypic or Arduino for myself. You can’t ever play around enough with these things. And to think it was always there and I never knew!

Hacking these things has been fairly easy thanks to some pretty handy pieces of software we stumbled upon at IeaRobotics and a bit of Python magic. The tools of the trade were Pydownloader to program the Skypic, libStargate to interface the PC and the bot, and finally Pywii, a wonderful Wiimote library.

We ended up implementing a new server for the Skypic that should enable a smooth control of the acceleration applied to the Skybot in response to the Wiimote’s movements. To handle it we had to extend libStargate. Our job wasn’t particularly hard to do, but up until now you only had the chance of applying an all-or-nothing type of movement. Now the acceleration is proportional to the pitch and roll values of the controller. Since the controlling code is in the PIC instead of the computer, the effect is really smooth.

The bot has dual power. 6V for the Skypic and 9V for the servos. If only we had used 12V for these the effect would be nicer yet, but overall its fine.

I’ll clean the code a bit before submitting the patches to the project’s author, and I hope to have it ready and submitted this week along with a new wrapper class around libStargate to control specifically the SkyBots with PWM capabilities. It is called pySkybot, by the way.

You can see the whole story at Hackaday. Although I’m not really used to hacking with circuits, I do check some of these sites on a regular basis. And I must say every now and then they come up with things that make me wish I were Ajo ;-)

It uses a Skypic board as brains and a Sky293 board for power, both of which are free hardware licensed under Creative Commons. Besides that it has some cheap sensors, the simplest skeleton ever, a couple of Futaba servos and a Wiimote (yet to be incorporated) as inexpensive do_it_all sensor. It’s not that a Wii Remote is cheap. Compare what it has to offer (accelerometer, optical sensor, Bluetooth connectivity) to the price of any single raw component from that list and you’ve got yourself the best deal ever!! And yes… if you own a Wii you can play with it too as a bonus. Thanks to Andres Prieto-Moreno (Hi, Teach!) for pointing out the possibilities of this little wonder.

Here… take a look.

It isn’t fancy and does nearly nothing for now. The big wheels are just some CDs held together with balloons and rubber bands. You can have a closer look at the Skypic board in the upper view. In the bottom view you can see the servos, IR sensors, bumpers and the battery pack.

You can find all the information on these boards and a lot of other technical stuff on robotics at IEA robotics. Everything is in Spanish, though.

This week we’ll be adding the Wiimote and start with the real programming. The fun part is almost there. I can feel it ;-)