Hi folks,

Might need some help on this project over the next few months but I had a brainwave a few weeks ago after finding an old R.A.D robot whilst rumaging around in my attic.

For those who are not familiar with R.A.D, he's around 15 inches tall with a pair of caterpillar tracks for drive. The robot was originally controlled via a hand remote over 27MHz. In addition to basic forward, back, turning via differential track control, he could also bend over and pick up objects with a basic pair of gripping arms, provided the "Beer tray" is removed from the normally front mounted position. The coup-de-grace of the robot is a 3 foam dart firing gun mounted in the chest of the robot and a pretty crap capability of voice transmission from a mic on the transmitter to the speaker in the robot.

  There are some similarities between the RAD and Spykee and I'm hoping to be able to utilise the Spykee control board for motion control. I don't think the RAD has encoders on the drive so will require a bit of hacking to enable the Spykee controller feedback but that shouldn't be insurmountable. I'm thinking of using a pair of 8 cell sub "C" packs mounted in the base which should give plenty of power and also offset the original top heaviness of the RAD. A bit more judicial hacking should enable the webcam to be mounted into the head and possibly use the original LEDs (Decorative) for headlight illumination and possible IR for stealthy nightime activities.

  Where I need help is with the secondary function controls. The bend-over bit should be able to be controlled with the Arduino head tilt mod but I still require control for gripping and gun fire. I wondered if anyone has come up with a way of utilising the useless sound effects with Spykee to enable alternative control assignments. There are quite a few options available and if only half can be used, this will give a considerable set of additional controls. The only other way I could think of doing it would be to set up the Arduino to accept a binary coded decimal input. The 2 LED plus the headlight should give a 3 bit BCD input which should enable a theoretical 7 possible output, more than enough to pick things up and shoot at the missus and cats. This is where I struggle as I'm a software newbie although I can get my way around the hardware. If anyone can help here, I would be most grateful for any advice.

 I'm hoping this will be an interesting project and will post progress once I get over the initial hurdles.

Hope to hear from some software folks.

Regards, Nat.