You’re in love with the battlefield scene and it must be interesting, if you can build an autonomous tank all by yourself, isn’t it? Well, since you’ve asked for it, then you got what you’re dreaming here!

This autonomous tank is simply the best, as it not only smaller and faster, but it has an easier maneuverable than other tanks did. It has the capability to remove humans from dangerous areas instantly.

The main purpose of this project is to design and build a scaled proof of concept for an autonomous tank.

This is how the autonomous tank working:

First of all, it uses infrared sensors to locate a target near the vehicle.

Then, it approaches the target using a color tracking algorithm and a digital video camera.

When the target is within shooting range, the turret is aimed and a projectile is fired automatically.

The autonomous tank is built based on the ICOP Technology eBox-2300, where is act as the main brain of the tank. It responsible to read all the sensor data and operates the motors via a Phidgets 8/8/8 with an LCD text display. Beside that, it equipped with five IR motion sensors, an ultrasonic range finder and a USB webcamera.

For those that always involved themselves in the “Mini-sumo competition”, the Mini-sumo robot is very common to the developers. No matter you’re the amateur or the professional in the robotic development field, this Seeker II is going to amaze you here!

For your information, this Seeker II is a low, fast and very aggressive mini-sumo robot, where is equipped with wide tires that provide a lot of traction than other mini-sumo did.

The Seeker II’s brain is based on a Microchip PIC16F876 and is programmed in C language. Beside that, there PIC16F876 have several useful features, such as:

1. It has two-channel hardware pulse width modulation (PWM), which is mainly for providing precise control over the speed of the two motors.
2. Four analog to digital converters (ADC) are used to interface to two range-finder and two edge-detector sensors.
3. A 16 bit hardware timer (It increments a 35 bit integer millisecond counter).
4. The hardware UART, where is used to program the PIC using the bootloader and to run a menu-driven debug system.
5. The EEPROM is used for a simple log to show the mini-sumo’s state transitions.

The Seeker II is rather smaller than any other mini-sumo robots, as it has the dimension of 10cmx10cmx3.8cm and it only weighs about 430 grams!

You’re always want to challenge yourself doing something extraordinary than the dull, boring projects? How about figure out the ways to connect the multiple Arduino microcontrollers with I2C? Is it sounds interesting enough?

You might probably asking, “You must be kidding, isn’t it? It’s a piece of cake to connect the multiple Arduino microcontrollers with I2C!” Well, in order to prove that you’re capable to handle this project, then let’s jump into the project straightly!

First thing first, you’ll use I2C to connect several Arduinos together to combine their power. Oh, by the way, do you know the definition of “I2C”? (Hold on a second, it has nothing to do with the Y2K! lol)

I2C is the short form of “Inter Integrated Circuits”, where is one of the well-known multi master serial computer bus technologies. It has been widely being used in different systems, especially to connect the peripherals of low speed data transmission. Phillips was the company that invented this I2C, but is used in many electronic applications in nowadays.

Let us back to the main topic. If you’re working with two Arduinos, you have to properly make sure that one of them must be the master while the other must be the slave (It has no exception in this case). In addition, you might need to use a minimum 1K (It’s even better to use the 2K) pull-up resistor on every single line, where will pull it up to 5 volts!

Gravity is a very strange and bizarre thing. Well, you cannot see, touch or hear it, but it does exist in our life! Honestly, have you ever imagined the life without the existence of gravity? WoW, isn’t it fabulous or it would become a disaster?

Thanks to Sir Isaac Newton, the incredible English mathematician who accidently discovered the gravity, where an apple was hitting his head when he was resting under an apple tree! (Good lord, I wished that I can be hit by a coconut, as maybe I can come out with some new formulas! lol)

If you have the interest to explore the gravity deeper, then this Gravitron is the ideal device that you’ve searching for!

As you can see on the above figure, the Gravitron’s cover is actually a half ping pong ball. When you look even closer, there’s a red dot on the rim and it’s always stayed up. Of course, you can try to turn it whenever you want, but the red dot will go up again afterward! Read more »

Zero Pin Loader, do you have any idea what this stuff for? To be honest, some of you here might haven’t hear or use it before.

Actually, the Zero Pin Loader is a bootloader for the PICmicro 18F series. Its main function is to avoid the use of I/O pins, by simply exploiting the /MCLR pin as the only interface between the host PC and the PICmicro. It uses the PIC16F877 microcontroller as the main part, where is having the ability to write to their own code memory.

The Zero Pin Loader is unique, as the interface between the PC serial port and the target uses six components! The standard /MCLR is one of the six components. The interface circuit can be put in a common DB9 shell and with a DIP clip for the connection to the target.

There’s some downfall for this Zero Pin Loader and you have to get it solved. Most of the development environments have the transparent bootloader, but the limitation being that the highest 384 instructions are not available to the application. Hence, you have to ensure that the bootloader puts a jump to its own code at the very first address to overcome the problem!