PicIo Chip Home

A Pic Microcontroller with it's digital and analog IO allows creators of electronic projects to make intellegent devices that are both low-power as well as low-cost.   Several projects will be shown that have been developed with  Pic microcontrollers.  

This webpage started out a few years back to discuss my PicIo chip system which allows hobbists to use a pre-programmed  Pic Microcomputer combined with a DLL to take the complexity out of creating USB controlled devices.  This site does not attempt to explain details on the bots being shown but does go into depth on the PicIo chip solution.

The 'Bot' devices described have been developed using the 'SourceBoost  IDE' which I cannot say enough good things about.    Projects typically use recent models of the Microchip Pic Microcontrollers  that  I have found to be full featured,  energy efficient, and very low cost.   
 

BugBot is a 4 inch long  robot who uses  muscle wire on his legs and body to move.  He uses a Pic microprocessor to sequence his movements and his 'master' controls him via a radio control unit taken from one of the common 1.5 inch long radio controlled cars found on technical toy sites.  This little guy presented me with many mechanical as well as electrical problems mostly due to the constraints of working with a muscle wire.  His body is 65mm long (2.5 inches) and the LiPoly battery he carries below his body only gives him 3.7 volts to then be used to drive about 200milliamps through the wires which heats them and causes the 5 percent contraction of muscle wire.    This little guy moves very slowly because each step moves about 3-4mm while taking a couple seconds due to heating and cooling speeds for the muscle wire.   A BugBot movie  (14megByte download) will show you BugBot in 'action'  (however slow that may seem ... it is still 'action')


MotoBot is a self contained, thinking bot with limited vision as well as other assorted sensors.  Motobot  is powered by a compact LiPoly battery he has two bi-directional wheels and is a fully self contained  thinking bot who thinks with a PIC microprocessor and can be controlled with a radio hand-controller.  His 'phase 2' as shown above still allows him to be controlled via  radio as in phase 1 so he can be told to move in assorted patterns using  separately controlled dual drive wheels.   New to phase two is his ability to make decisions and operate on his own.  

He can also be told via radio to break out of his automatic mode to do manual control and then can be told to go back into automatic mode or run some pre-programmed sequences.   Each wheel has several  speeds forward  backward so he is quite able to get around (a lot quicker than BugBot I might add).

Motobot has a single home-brew eye which allows him to detect objects from side to side as well as determine how far they are away IF he knows some of their characteristics beforehand.   You can see  he has two downward optical sensors so he can detect and stay within areas with reflective tape as his limits.    

While operating in this his 'wandering withing a boundry' mode he from time to time will  look around for a  small light and if he sees it he moves right up to it so it is dead center and not violating his 'personal space'.  He then  pauses for several seconds before getting boored and turning around and wandering in his area till next time he becomes 'curious'.   Once in curious mode some anoying human may move his little light and if it approaches him he backs off (comfort zone) but if it moves away or to either side he continues to track it until it is in his comfort zone for a while and he gets board and goes back to wandering.

MotoBot first came to life in late 2007 and had his vision and so on by Jan  2008.  MotoBot will be able to have a lot of fun once he is able to sense other things (like with his ears not yet in service but in the above picture).   In motobot's Phase 3 development starting in early 2008  he will begin to physically interact with objects as well as perhaps communicate in  simple audio conversations.

AND now ... for something completely different ...


The above battery load tester  was developed from the sample demo GUI for PicIoChips.  This involves knowing how to work with Visual C++ .NET .    What is of note is that  this application uses very little code and hooks up over USB to the PicIo chip using the DLL library to be discussed later in this site's pages.