Need help with Mr. Tidy
Need help with Mr. Tidy
by Jezter
Tue Aug 23, 2011 9:18 pm
Hi, I have a Mr. Tidy robot and from what I understand I should be able to take it out of the box, Upload the sample software, and this thing should just go ahead and pick up cups. Well mine does not. I am stummped and been working on this thing for a week now. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
Re: Need help with Mr. Tidy
by OddBot
Wed Aug 24, 2011 2:16 am
Jezter wrote:Hi, I have a Mr. Tidy robot and from what I understand I should be able to take it out of the box, Upload the sample software, and this thing should just go ahead and pick up cups. Well mine does not. I am stummped and been working on this thing for a week now. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
No, this is not a toy that you just "turn on".
Mr. Tidy is a complex robot with many sensors, some that need to be calibrated to work properly. Especially the IR object detection and navigation sensors which need some mechanical adjustment to ensure they are correctly aligned (e.g. Have the LEDs and photo transistors of each sensor parallel to each other).
Although the sample code worked on a robot it my office there is some calibration that must also be done in the code such as adjusting the PWM values of the red green and blue LEDs for colour recognition.
The sample code is intended as a base you can build upon with subroutines for most of the basic functions. You can program the robot to sort objects by size, weight and colour if you wish.
by Jezter
Wed Aug 24, 2011 11:30 am
Forgive my ignorance as this is my first robot but where do I even begin on any of that. I have some electronics experience but I'm not familiar with arduino at all.... I'm kind of lost on this whole thing. I now know that I should be a little more knowledgeable before tackling something I thought would be so easy.
by OddBot
Thu Aug 25, 2011 2:28 am
Jezter wrote:Forgive my ignorance as this is my first robot but where do I even begin on any of that. I have some electronics experience but I'm not familiar with arduino at all.... I'm kind of lost on this whole thing. I now know that I should be a little more knowledgeable before tackling something I thought would be so easy.
[/quote]No need to apologise. You will need to learn to program in Arduino C language which is a simplified version of C++. You will find that once you can program an Arduino then your electronics experience will be a big help.
If you join a site like "letsmakerobots.com" then you will receive a lot of help. You can learn about the language more here: http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/HomePage