When it comes to a robot performing the most mundane task people really get elaborate. The electrical engineering students from the University of North Carolina, called [swighton], created a robot that plays games on his iPhone. It uses two servo motors to rotate along the X and Y axes. An Arduino reads the voltage from the center tap of the joystick potentiometers, and then converts it to the degrees that the servo should be rotated. It gives the choice of linear control mapping where the rotation of the phone corresponds exactly to the control stick movement, and exponential mapping where the joystick movements around center move the servos less, ramping up as your get away from center – which gives more precision for small movements. “The Arduino allowed me to create a completely programmable test controller for the robot in the span of about 2 hours. Contrast that with fully analog control circuit for my Jr. Design robot, which does almost exactly the same function as the circuit I made today (without the awesome exponential control mapping) -except it took 3 months and about 250 hours to make. Of course if I was making 10,000 test controllers the Arduino wouldn’t be suitable, and it would be worth engineering a low cost board, but for just one, the Arduino rules,” said [swighton]. To see the complete design process visit: http://mechanicallyinclined.net/blog/?author=1
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