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Problems with diodes

Post 1

Pilpingto -Knower of Noses

Today it was a brilliantly sunny day. I decided that the beast thing to do on a brilliantly sunny day (especially a day when my Power Machines lecture was cancelled) was to build a robot. The robot in quesiton was to be a robot of the line-following nature (that is, a robot that tracks lines by bouncing Infra-red light off the ground and measuring how much bounces back).

The robot (whom I think I will call "CCtron" unitl I find a better name) already had the brain, written in assembler code and burned onto a PIC microprocessor, but was in dire need of a body. I proceeded to remedy this situation by removing the innards of a remote control car and splicing CCTron's microbaord into the newly vacated chassis.

Next was to build a good set of eyes for my new friend. By eyes, I mean a set of 5 infra-red diode emitter /reciever pairs. The installation of these eyes proved to be a problem. For some reason I just couldn't get them to respond to ground brightness changes by more than a fraction of a Volt. It may have been a problem with the resistors, but I can't be sure.

After spending an hour or so pondering over the situatuion, I decided that a myopic robot was better than none, packed up CCtron, and went home for a nice dinner. Who needs a working robot anyway, when you have sunshine and snacks. Maybe tommorow I will try to get CCtron working (or maybe I will sleep in and clean my domicile, who knows!)


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