YES i think so too,one reason i am looking at getting the circuit together and soon make a schematic and parts needed ,and may be the scripts ,i would take about $170 total including a second board

Other idea too ,i dont know if it would work and sold wwell over 20 of them at about $110 each is a laser with optics and receiver and microsoft with software called LIDAR for navigation,thats uses on neato XV-11 vacuum cleaner to to find home base a connect to it, few guy here got one from me

DOES need some coding,but API CODES are made and works very well with LINUX ROS witch has the drivers for it

so no circuit needs to be made,an email for more info on it [email protected] i have 10 left till i buy more from neato company and they sell fast oin ebay,just this week a lady in france bought one to place on her quadcopter ,very cool idea

Jumping back to the idea of providing navigation illumination from a second EZ-B (not that I think this is the best idea, just examining the options). Your robot does not need enough light as a person, just enough for the camera to see. EZ-B can easily turn LED's on and off, and you can get some very bright ones, and they are very low voltage, so perfectly safe. So similar to my idea of providing IR LED's with different blink patterns in each room (still need pattern recognition added to ARC or someone - maybe me one day, but not soon - needs to do it with the SDK), you could also discreetly locate bright white LED's for illumination.

Personally, I am going to have an IR camera on my BOT with the IR illuminators on the bot, so no need for room lights, but I think this simplifies the solution considerably from trying to interface your bot to your home lighting. That being said, there are tons of home automation solutions that could have the computer that drives the bot also control house lighting and other things too, but I think we are looking for cheap, easy, and reliable and most home automation only meet two of those three criteria at any time.

Alan

I completely agree Alan. I have no reason for using an IR camera as I can have my bot turn my lights on and off as needed but my situation is not the norm and I cannot base a solution on things I already have in place... so the IR camera is a great idea and solves a lot of the issues.

Even the camera which comes in the EZ Robot kit doesn't need much light, I have a very dimly lit house, it struggles with face recognition (phantom faces) but glyph and qr codes it picks up fine in low light.

If using a second EZB the option of a camera on the dock with custom object recognition using harr isn't out of the question. it would be a lot of work, it would be a bit extra cost but it would be very reliable... Robot gets in to line of camera on dock, dock recognises it as the robot, dock controls the robot and guides it in.

Going back to @rgordon's excellent summary of the issues and possible solutions, #1 was detecting the need to charge. What are people doing for that? I am sure it would involve one of the analog ports of the EZ-B, but what are you using to convert raw voltage into a low voltage signal EZ-B can read? How are you calibrating to your batteries? How are you sure what is low enough to still navigate home without dying on the way? Etc....

Alan

YES THAT i being try to say to use a econd EZB so much you cann add sensors or relays or lights and have to cotrol your robot,if if you have progamable charging design even better

I made one and had 2 boards made for it and soon hopping to make many more boards to sell DESIGN is set up to charge almost any battery made and have adjustable voltage,current and c rate plus when done goes to trickle charge

Alan, check the cloud, I uploaded a simple battery monitor script a few weeks ago which uses the ADC port(s) to monitor the battery voltage.

In fact, let's put the code here as it will be usefull;

# Read voltage level of battery and report to software.
# Set variables
# Change $vmin to low level alert value
# Change $vmax to battery full charge
# Change $multiplyer if using voltage divider
# Factor is 5/255 for adc value conversion to volts
$vmin = 3.6
$vmax = 4.5
$multiplier = 2
$factor = 0.019607843

:ReadCells
# Get ADC values
$vc1 = GetADC(ADC0)
$vc2 = GetADC(ADC1)

# Convert values to voltage
$cell1 = $vc1 * $factor
$cell2 = $vc2 * $factor * $multiplier
$cell2 = $cell2 - $cell1
$batteryv = $cell1 + $cell2

# Log it
#FileWriteLine("C:\chargelog.txt","$date $cell1 $cell2 $batteryv")

# Check for errors on connections
Print("C1 Round($cell1,2)V")
Print("C2 Round($cell2,2)V")
Print("Ct Round($batteryv,2)V")
IF ($cell1 <=$vmin or $cell2 <=$vmin)
  Tweet("Melvin needs charging!")
ENDIF 
  # Wait 10 seconds
Sleep(200)
# Go back to the start
Goto(ReadCells)

I have adjusted it a little in my project which aren't shown in the above but the above will give an indication of how to monitor it. It is based on a 2s LiPo battery so needs to calculate cell 2 (cell 1 is easy as it is directly measured, cell 2 is measured by measuring the total and subtracting cell 1).

Also, $vc2 is generally above 5v so has to go through a simple voltage divider to halve the voltage recorded, the script then multiplies it by 2 before using it as a value.

The $factor is 5/255 as the ADC ports measure up to 5v and report a value of up to 255 so it needs converting back to volts.

I made a few adjustments to the above after copy & pasting as it looks like I had messed with it for checking the charging circuits but it should be clear and work for monitoring. I'll revisit the script later when I get home but off out now so in a bit of a rush.

Thanks Rich. My bot will have a 24v 17Amp Gel Cell to drive the wheelchair motors as well as some buck step down regulators to drop to 19 volts for the Netbook and 6 or 7 for the EZ-B. I am sure I can't connect that directly to the EZ-B ADC port or it will get toasted. The regulators I bought provide constant voltage until the input is within 2 volts of the output, so I can't measure from them. I think what I would need is to put resistors between the battery and the ADC so I am measuring relative voltage, not actual voltage, but it has been 30 years since I did any electronics, so I am a bit rusty on the specifics.

I am sure others have discussed this here, so I will do some searching after work and post links or conclusions to anything I find.

Alan

CAMERA works kina well with IR do need s9ome changes done to make it work,i know i tried a webcam to pick up a IR source and it didnt pick it up well ,very blurry and a big filled screen on the camera

thinking the same with a bluetooth camera too,and webcamera are much better ,only USB so both have good points and bad points