FC2Video

A car me and 4 others made at school, autumn 2006. It was an assignment. The car was to be able to find its way around a room. The thing on the front is a sonar. And it also has a sensor to figure out how much the trailer is turning relative to itself. The FPGA was supposed to do the low level stuff, like controlling the motors and read from the sensors. The readings was to be sent to the Java processor, which would use that to find out what to do, and then give instructions back to the FPGA. It was very challenging and very fun :)

A car me and 4 others made at school, autumn 2006. It was an assignment. The car was to be able to find its way around a room. The thing on the front is a sonar. And it also has a sensor to figure out how much the trailer is turning relative to itself. The FPGA was supposed to do the low level stuff, like controlling the motors and read from the sensors. The readings was to be sent to the Java processor, which would use that to find out what to do, and then give instructions back to the FPGA. It was very challenging and very fun :)

A car me and 4 others made at school, autumn 2006. It was an assignment. The car was to be able to find its way around a room. The thing on the front is a sonar. And it also has a sensor to figure out how much the trailer is turning relative to itself. The FPGA was supposed to do the low level stuff, like controlling the motors and read from the sensors. The readings was to be sent to the Java processor, which would use that to find out what to do, and then give instructions back to the FPGA. It was very challenging and very fun :)

A car me and 4 others made at school, autumn 2006. It was an assignment. The car was to be able to find its way around a room. The thing on the front is a sonar. And it also has a sensor to figure out how much the trailer is turning relative to itself. The FPGA was supposed to do the low level stuff, like controlling the motors and read from the sensors. The readings was to be sent to the Java processor, which would use that to find out what to do, and then give instructions back to the FPGA. It was very challenging and very fun :) The display was originally used for debugging. But we couldn't resist to put something more "interesting" there before we showed it to our teacher :p

Just showing the headlights :p Had to have that too of course ;)

Shows the calibration of the analog speedometer at startup. In other words, it is finding out how far it can go each way.

Just shows the car going around the track

Shows the calibration of the front steering. Seeing how far it can turn each way, and also figureing out what is center.

This was originally a school project. We was devided into groups, and was supposed to make a lego mindstorms car that drove around the track. Our group kind of went a bit beyond the task, and it was very fun. We replaced the firmware in the mindstorms box with LeJOS, a Java Virtual Machine. It steers with the wheel in the front. And the backwheels is on a differential. The "tail" on the back is an analog speed-o-meter. The trailer, as you can see in the video, can be tipped. And while it is tipping, it plays a tune :p I mean, it had the ability, so we just had to use it for something :p We had to use two mindstorm boxes to have enough input and output "ports". We also used a third one as a remote control, just to be geeky. It uses infrared, and is used to start and stop, and to start the tipping of the trailer. The car automatically stops while tipping. The turning flag is kind of silly, but we had an extra output port :p