the autonomous car project
Several years ago, when I was in high school, I was into hobby electronics. I loved building circuits, breaking stuff to see how it worked, and I even started to build my own robots. (don’t mind the tripod site… it’s pretty old!) I never graduated past the BASIC Stamp microcontroller when I abandoned the hobby in pursuit of other things – like a real car!
Well, I got the itch again, but I decided to take things a step further. A couple weeks ago I bought a remote control car from R/C Country in Sacramento, and I plan on making it fully autonomous over the next several weeks/months.
Since it’s been a few years since I’ve set out on a project like this, I’ve got quite a few ideas backed up of where to take it already. I’ve already bought 3 sonar sensors for range finding, a serial servo controller to manage steering and throttle control with room to spare, and a few other bits of electronics for it. I plan on having a gumstix motherboard as the brain – which is quite a step up from the BS2! This thing is going to have bluetooth, wifi, GPS for navigation, and a 3-axis accelerometer; it’s going to be a fully autonomous itinerant webserver of sorts :)
It’s all still in early stages of development, with lots of discussion and thought about various things, but I’m excited to be working with my hands and even more so to be back in the electronics game!
Here’s a few pictures of me, Router Dave, and Johnny working (and playing) on our various projects:
There are a few more on the Flickr Photoset.
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