Project Ideas

So some of the electronic project ideas I have had are:

1. New brain and motor driver board for my Mini Sumo robot
2. SD card interface to an AVR microcontroller
3. A DDS Function Generator that can go up to 10MHz
4. A vision system based off of an Analog Devices Blackfin 531/32/33 DSP
5. A robot brain for a Hexapod robot
6. Finally, a CPLD/FPGA experimenter board

I know some of my ideas are robotics related, but as you notice not all of them are. The function generator is just a piece of test equipment I want to build, where as the CPLD/FPGA experimenter’s board is just so I can play around with those devices.

The first thing I am going to be working on is my new brain for my mini sumo ‘bot. The current plan is to use an Atmel mega328 (compatible with Arduino) as the main controller, and maybe add a second controller that only handles the IR object detectors and reports back to the ‘328. Then I need to pick a motor driver chip, and decide if I want to use surface mount or through hole parts. If I go surface mount and other people like my design, they might not be able to build it. If I use all through hole, anyone could build it. I could even go as far as to make it a kit. Then again a surface mount board just looks high-tech and has that “Cool!” or “Wow!” factor. This is something I will have to think about.

Well I just want this to be a quick post, so I am ending it here.