Patience is the name of the game at this point. Pingbot v1 has been picked up by a major electronic kit distrubitor and will be available, well, sometime in the future. I'm starting to understand that progress can move relatively slowly in the professional electronic world, and that progress is made in time frames of months rather than weeks. More info to come when I have it.
Despite having a completely full list of projects to work on, I'm finding myself planning out version 3 of the pingbot. In the last six months I've learned a crazy amount about microcontrollers and PCB design, and with this new knowledge I could design a super Pingbot. One with more sensors, a uC with more functions, and a clean circuit board layout. All of this would equate to the robots being far more autonomous.
As is, the bots I've made are essentially puppets tied to an IR string; they don't make any decisions on their own and must be told what to do with a remote. Getting that to work was a milestone in itself, but now I want to start playing around with swarm behavior and the current design just doesn't have the power under the hood to do that well.
Despite having a completely full list of projects to work on, I'm finding myself planning out version 3 of the pingbot. In the last six months I've learned a crazy amount about microcontrollers and PCB design, and with this new knowledge I could design a super Pingbot. One with more sensors, a uC with more functions, and a clean circuit board layout. All of this would equate to the robots being far more autonomous.
As is, the bots I've made are essentially puppets tied to an IR string; they don't make any decisions on their own and must be told what to do with a remote. Getting that to work was a milestone in itself, but now I want to start playing around with swarm behavior and the current design just doesn't have the power under the hood to do that well.
