I'm planning on building a robot using Microchip PIC 16-bit MCUs, which I'm familiar with, and for which I have supporting hardware (demo boards, programmer, debugger, etc). After spending hours online understanding the open-source robotics scene, I've understood that most robotics projects aim to create robots that drive around, hear spoken commands, speak, and the like. I'm currently looking at something a lot simpler. My robot simply needs to read some sensors and move some motors. Is there an online library of open-source building blocks such as motor control, sensor interface, etc, that I can easily utilize on my current hardware? (PIC 24/32 or dsPIC). Obviously the Arduino scene has a lot of more code that can be reused, but I'm not planning on using an Arduino. Or should I? Tell me your views. Any advice is appreciated.
Electronic – Building block components for robot sensors and controllers
motorpicroboticssensorsoftware
Best Answer
The Derbot robot from University of Derby UK uses PIC Microprocessors for motor and sensors. I purchased the book Designing Embedded Systems with PIC Microcontrollers which uses the Derbot and PIC as examples. I purchased the Derbot kit direct from the author of the book. The Derbot uses Pumpkin Salvo Realtime OS which is interfaced from C++. I am currently looking at ROS Robot Operating System capability and how hard to send messages to the Pumkin OS.