Robot – Attacking Duck with CM-900

I got my Robotis Bioloid Premium Kit and at Maker Faire I got the new open source controller for it, the CM-900. I’m still waiting for some DIP headers, they seem to be out of stock all over the country and DigiKey has a rolling shipment date for my order (seems to be consistently three weeks in the future):-( So I can’t really connect sensors directly to the CM-900 without soldering the wires which would make the installation of the headers even harder.

I was thinking what I can do in the mean time. So let’s combine different bits & pieces;-) The little video shows an Attacking Duck. The mechanics are the same as the original example from the e-manual. But the controller is a CM-900, the sensor is a mindsensors NXT Sumo Eyes v2 element which talks to an Arduino ADK with installed OpenElectrons NXShield-M. The Arduino sends the info via it’s USB Host interface to the CM-900;-) So no soldering for now;-)  The Ardiuno is powered by a little wall wart, the CM-900 and the Dynamixels get their power from the original battery pack.

The software for the CM-900 was heavily inspired by the original *.tsk source for the duck. All the values etc. are the same. It’s just reading the sensor data from the USB port instead from the original IR sensors as the CM-530 did. The little sketch (?) is Robotis_Lego_Duck_CM900.

The sketch for the Arduino is using the USB_Host_Shield_2 along with all the needed NXT stuff from the sites above. It’s reading the sensor and sending one character status updates to the CM-900. All of that seems to be working fast enough;-) The sketch is Robotis_Lego_Duck.

As always, have fun combining stuff;-)