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Hi I'm new here. I have been working with Arduino's for a while now. I have a full scale replica R2D2 I built. Its mainly controlled via RC but I have been adding autonomous functions. It appears that EZ-robot is the answer or best way to go a bought this. But I have a few quick questions:
1). Can 2 EZ-B4 boards talk to each other via WIFI
2). Can 2 EZ-B4 boards talk to each other via Serial
3). What is the expansion port for?
If you'd like to see a short video of my project so far:
I think you'll find EZ Robot is what your looking for. I'm automating a full size B9 and am amazed what it's doing to make my robot come alive.
d.cochran's completely correct in all he states. If your worried about being tethered to a computer you can run the droid from a smart phone or even put a Mini ATX motherboard and SSD hard drive somewhere on him. Or just keep everything on a small laptop and sit it on a table somewhere around the house. If you take the little guy out you can hook directly to the laptop without the need of a router and Wifi network!
I hope you stick around. I'd love to see what your R2 can do with EZB.
when technology changes, I can continue to use the same controllers and upgrade my laptop, which I would do anyway.
my Bot would be connected to my WiFi anyway.
the Bot would now have access to my network or anything on the internet
the processing can happen much better on my i7 without dedicating it to just my robot.
the cost of getting into this becomes much lower because I wasn't having to buy a board capable of all of this processing.
my robot could now do more than I had ever imagined.
I decided it was right for me. Then I downloaded ARC and saw how easy it was to make the Bot do almost anything. I was sold.
The project must be built in ARC on a Windows 7 or higher PC but once saved to the cloud you can run it from an android/iOS device if required.
The combination of EZ-B and PC processing really blows all other controllers away. Very simple to modify a project or even build and test one on the fly.
And, above all else, awesome support from EZ-Robots and this community.
I agree this dose blow Arduino's out of the water and then some.
Dave,
Thanks for the complements.
Thanks for all your help.
Thanks yes I think it would be impressive.
Ok so I thought of yet another question. The speaker, can it be external or plugged into an small amp ?
also wondering a bought the microphone, can it be external ?
microphone is a bit different. I am trying to figure out what to do there also. Thinking about a Bluetooth mic to the PC. If you are going with a phone, there would be options there, but I haven't researched that yet.
this is about setting up an external speaker..
d.cochran's link to the way to break out sound to an external amp will lead you to the work I did when I wanted to do just this. It has pictures of where to attach and even a video of how it turned out. It's amazing what high quality sound you can produce. It seems only limited by the quality of your sound files and your sound system.system. I see the link d.cochran provided is not hyper so feel free to click on this:
Breaking out then sound from EZB V4
Here's a link to my B9 project thread here on this forum and a couple others you may be interested in:
First Real Look At My Ez-b Controlled Full Size Lis B9 Robot - lots of videos and pics.
Power
More then one EZB
Low power
Serial Communication
Grab bag
Grab bag
Sabertooth & Kangaroo X2
Sabertooth & Kangaroo X2
Here's an outside link to lots of pics of the process of building my B9:
Building my B9
Again, thanks for the interest. Please return and share any progress you make and let us know if you have any questions or need help. Seems to be lots of folks willing to lend a hand.
Dave Schulpius
The mic needs to be on the person speaking ideally. It also needs isolation i.e. when not being used it wants to stop listening otherwise you get a lot of false commands. Jarvis used to talk to himself a lot!
I have tried a whole range of microphones for Jarvis from the Kinect mic to high quality directional mics with noise reduction. None work very well. I will admit that I do have very high standards though.
I finally found a wireless mic on the person/people speaking worked a lot better. The accuracy was greatly increased and I now have no triggering from false commands. Accuracy of understanding the spoken words is also dramatically increased, previously I would need a confidence level of 75% for Jarvis to trigger events, any higher and it wouldn't accept them. I now have this set to 97% and rarely do I need to repeat commands and never does noise trigger commands.
Another note though, I use dictation with Jarvis for quite a lot of commands rather than have a set phrase list. For a small phrase list I'm sure the setup could be of a much lower quality but do you really want that?
That said I don't want to ware a mic when talking to my B9 and also want others to try to speak to him. I'm OK with some false triggers as it makes him look more autonomous. The coolest thing that happened recently was a friend of mines young son was sitting on a bar stool in front of B9 watching a game of pinball on one of my games. B9 suddenly bent over him and scared the crap out of him. Poor kid but we all laughed till we had tears.
Anyway, I've had real good success with a stand up mic called The Blue Snowball. It has several settings and even looks cool.