In those months, apart from kids and work, I started to play with a lot more electronics and robotics things.

The first thing I’d like to show you is my mobile platform.

Nice, isn’t it ? ;)

As I wanted to dig a little deeper in robotics world, I needed 2 things:

• a long term goal, some dream project that I don’t know if it’s doable, no planning and such
• sub goals of short projects that will help me in the larger picture.

In a far far away future, I’d like to have a mobile robot wandering  in the house (ooops, stairs :) ) avoiding obstacles and able to launch  an alert in case of unwanted presence (picture snapshot? video stream?).

And I lied… I have a second long term project, something already done  by others: a Pixar Luxo lamp with minimal facial recognition and IA  behaviours.

To achieve those goals, I decided to run little experiments in the meantime.
(yes, that’s the blog title and purpose ;) ) (note: at that time, the blog was called Little Experiments)

What I already started:

• a simple 4WD robot
• learn or remember electronics ;)
• a webcam on a pan/tilt that I can control from computer
• learn to use OpenCv
• control a 2 lines LCD from my Raspberry

What is planned:

• add IR and/or ultrasonic sensor to implement obstacle avoidance
• control a 2.8” touch screen from Pi and/or the Arduino
• add JY-MCU to Arduino and have communication with a computer
• control the Arduino from the Raspberry
• stream video from the Pi to a computer

What is just in my mind:

• experiment with plastic polymorph
• build some quadri or hexa pod
• play with 2.4Ghz R/C transmitter/receiver

That’s a lot and I’ll go deeper in each of those in later, but closer, blog posts.

As the subject of this post was Gary, I’ll finish with little details on it.

It is based on a DFRobot kit called 4WD Mobile Platform
The brain is a compatible Arduino board with motor bridge already on it called Romeo

I took some pictures during the assembly of the kit.

If french is not a problem, I had some details already in a forum where I got help.

This remind me that I need to push everything in a nice project page on Let’s make robots

As I already started to play with it, expect a IR sensor on Gary very soon. Next I’ll add the ultrasonic I just received.

See ya!