arduino programming

[Danjr1]

Anyone have any experience of this? and how difficult it can be?

[PJ-27]

I've had a good play around with Arduino's in the past, made a few musical interfaces.

The languages you code in are pretty straight forward and I had great fun but it does take time.

There is an end less sea of info on the net though and plenty of code up for grabs.

I also managed to integrate Max/MSP (if you know that) and use the JavaScript function in that (if you know JS as well)

Never used one in a robot though.

[Marien]

I used it to produce an autonomous race car. The programming is comparable to Basic, Pascal, C and so on. There is lots of help and examples on the Arduino website and other sites.
There are also lots of extra libraries available. I used one that simplyfies using RC servo's and speedcontrolers.

[PJ-27]

Yeh I found one for Servos once, used it to make a semi-autonomous real drum machine.

[Danjr1]

its just pie-in-the-sky thinking at the mo, but I've come up with an axe-bot, with the axe being powered by two 22.2v drill motors through some gears which is all controlled via an arduino computer i.e. ill just press a button on the TX and the axe will fire backwards and forwards continuously until i release the button, where it should then return the axe back inside the bot. It's defo possible but it would need some sort of ability to sense where the axe is in its travel.

[PJ-27]

Put a variable resistor on it, same principle that a servo works on.

I get the impression that Arduino's are quite fragile and designed to be very powerful. For something like that you need a simple dev board with PWM ports. Coding should be fairly straight forward.

[kane]

You'd probably be better looking at the picaxe for that sort of development.