Status Update On Papilio-Based Robot Avatar Project

Here’s a great follow-up on the progress of Duane Benson’s Papilio-based tele-presence avatar project which we covered here on the blog a little while back. Looks like he is moving forward with the overall implementation in strides.

Referring to the photo above, Duane gives us the run-down from a hardware standpoint:

Toward the lower-left, we see a Papilio One FPGA development board from the Gadget Factory. The small green board hanging off the left-hand side of the Papilio One is a “Wing” (similar in concept to an Arduino “Shield”) carrying a few push button switches and LEDs. I’m using this Wing to mimic some of the final controls — two buttons must be pressed simultaneously to energize the robot; one button will act as an emergency power cut-off.

On the lower-right is a joystick board of my own design. This employs a PIC16F1825 to read the two potentiometers and one switch on the analog joystick. It converts the readings into I2C data to be sent back to the Papilio.

The board stack in the upper portion of the photograph is the power motor driver set. On top is a PIC microcontroller, which communicates with the Papilio over I2C. The board in the middle has voltage regulators and a power relay. Finally, the board on the bottom is a power H-bridge.

So, that’s the hardware! Awesome. Now all you need to do is cruise on over to All Programmable Planet, (where Duane is a resident blogger) to read his status update on the tele-presence avatar project. Duane has put up a video on the original article as well as some code examples that he’s working on.

Here’s more on the project so far:

• Robot Avatar Progress Report (All Programmable Planet)
• Creating An FPGA-Based Robot Avatar (All Programmable Planet)
• Implementing SPI & I2C Interfaces On Papilio One (Gadget Factory via APP)

(via All Programmable Planet)