Here is a short sneak peak of a project we are working on.
When the project is finished we are going to write a guide about it, publish the code and of course make a longer video explaining the different parts and showing the Segway in action!
I can briefly say that we are using 2x 12V motors + Motorcontroller from Pololu, a 6DOF board from Sparkfun, a FEZ Rhino and a 12V battery pack.
The data from the 6DOF board is run thru a Kalman filter, whose data is used in a PID filter to regulate the motors. More details and source code will come soon!
Some of you might have noticed the new upcoming product in the Arduino series, the Arduino Due. The Arduino Due is going to be the first Arduino with a processor not being an AVR.
Arduino Due - ARM based Arduino
The Arduino Due is going to contain an ARM Cortex-M3 processor from Atmel, the SAM3U, running at 96MHz. This processor has got a lot more Flash and SRAM than the original Arduino boards, and includes 5 SPI buses, 2 I2C interfaces, 5 UARTs, 16 Analog inputs and a whole bunch of Digital I/Os.
With the processing power of this new board and the big community around the Arduino family, we are going to see much bigger and more advanced projects in the future.
Finally Arduino has realised the need for a more powerfull but easy development board for the market. They have realised that the ARM-family is the way to go in the embedded world, and I am very satisfied with the choice of an Cortex-M3 processor, which is relatively low cost, has a fair amount of processing power, Flash and SRAM and of course also a lot of usefull periphirals.
Their plan is to have this board ready for the market by the end of 2011. We are definitely looking forward to test and review this! Read more…
