Oh we sure have

Many people know it began in my basement, but what they don't know is that it began in a closet in my basement! At the time, i was experimenting with both robotics and music. To be frank, i was heavily focused on music. I was working on making background music for video games and theatrical scores - mostly ambiance. So the main area (developed part) of my basement was consumed with a music studio setup.

EZ-Robot was limited to a small 8x10 foot storage closet with a plywood bench that i made.

*See on the left side of the bench the PC motherboard with wires connected to it? It's not in the case, i don't even know why the case is there. That was www.ez-robot.com when it first went online. For many years it was literally a motherboard on a bench, not even in a case. Just sat there exposed like that, hard drive and all..

The first robot i created at the time was called K@. It was a cat, get it? K @ (at)? ha, anyway - it was a plastic toy cat and i put a distance sensor on the front. Used a LM298n dual h-bridge motor controller and a microchip pic16f877 with CCS C Compiler. At this time, i had no idea how to even control a servo, yet. The only experience i had with motor controlling was a few contract projects i did quite a few years ago using stepper motors. One was for a 1.8 meter diameter telescope sensor and the other for an oil & gas NDT robot.

The k@ robot was terrible, absolutely terrible. I recall one day sitting on my front steps with some neighbors having a beer in the sun. This one friend mentioned to the group that i was working on a robot and everyone convinced me to bring it out. I put this plastic toy messy wired robot on the sidewalk, plugged in the battery and it started driving around in circles... with a huge breadboard taped to its back.

Needless to say, most of the group rolled their eyes and everyone else laughed.

Around this time i started learning how to create PWM on the PIC to move servos. I found some example code that used the 2 comparitors on the 877 to control only 2 servos. That had me wondering if there was a way i could control servos using a timer instead, so other code could still run. Remember, this is before Arduino even had a non-twitchy servo library. I was able to get 4 servos running using a timer and still have CPU ticks for a main program to run. So, i created K-9.

K-9 didn't start as a plastic shell though, he started as a Tamaiya bulldozer kit. Pretty cute.

I used K-9 a lot to experiment with mapping. It held a 2 dimensional array that maintained a historical view of it's surroundings of a Sharp IR Distance Sensor. Not using any encoders, I used a timer that was aligned with the speed of the continuous rotation servos. There's videos of K-9 getting out from some interesting environments of chair legs in my dining room. The code worked quite well, when it worked Soon as the wheels slipped enough, it was mostly a mess of random movements.

The K-9 head would move back and forth along the ground as it moved to scan and save the distances of objects in front of it.

I then added an IR sensor so K-9 could follow remote controls - which was kinda neat...

Wow! That's a really interesting, how it started with K@ and now it's.. THIS! EZ-Robot is awesome. I don't think anything can change that.