From: cpg@cs.utexas.edu (Carlos M. Puchol)
Newsgroups: comp.robotics,comp.sys.m68k
Subject: Blimps and robots
Date: 18 Nov 1992 21:48:10 -0600
Organization: aaah ha ha ha!
NNTP-Posting-Host: coltexo.cs.utexas.edu
Keywords: Minboard, 332BCC, robots, beers, fun.

Hi folks, 

crs@sybase.com (Craig Saunders) writes:
>I was directed to this news group by someone who said there was a thread
>about using small blimps to simulate "fish behavior".
>I am actually interested in chatting with anyone who has experience building
>small blimps (<12') that could be used with radio control...

About the blimps, the group in Austin is called The Robot Group and
you may have seen it in a recent Invention program in the Dicovery Channel.
There are at least three blimps currently but (as far as I know) none of
them was used to simulate "fish behavior". All of them use propellers.

One of them uses a rotating sonar range finder which gathers data for a
neural network and learns to navigate without bumping into walls. This one
can lift several pounds and has a 68HC11 and 332BCC onboard.

There is another one which has two wings on the bottom that provide the
forward propulsion. It is radio controlled. It has two legs on the
bottom that makes it run to take off.

There was a "fish" blimp which has a "fish" tail that provides the forward
propulsion. This one has a few PWM-controlled fans for altitude control.

If there is enough interest, we have a video tape of the blimps (and other
robot projects we have) that we can make available for a nominal postage
and duplication donation :-). Please contact me for more information.

We have put so far three Robofest shows (one more coming next summer/fall)
and in addition of the blimps, we have a wide variety of robots, including:
the Robot Band, ProtoAndroid, Varmint (a four legged walking robot), the
Pittbull dog (a pneumatic robot dog), DweebVision (an inexpensive telepresence
demonstrator). There are some other projects related to virtual reality.

The Robot Group is a non-profit organization and meets once a week around
some beers and is mostly formed by artists, scientists, students and
engineers from local industry.

We have many ongoing projects which include the 68HC11 and 68332
microprocessors, in miniboards, 332BCCs, our own custom HC11 board and
EVBS, and we are interested in corresponding with people involved with
any software tools for these processors.

For one of the projects we have, I was wondering if there are any you out
there who have written any routines for the SPI for either the 68HC11 or
the 68332 (e.g. for the miniboard).

I am trying to write primitives for message passing communication
in a string of daisy-chained miniboards and 332BCCs. The BCCs are
going to be in master mode in a "token-passing ring." (The
token-passing will be done in software, not hardware, the network will
be a parallel SPI bus).

Well, since I am doing it in C and cross compiling with GCC, if the
work is done in C, that would be a heck of a lot easier to port, but
assembly would be accepted. The code will be available to the
net when done.

Cheers,

-- 
-- Carlos Puchol
-- cpg@cs.utexas.edu		CS Department, UT Austin
Organization: Freshman, CIT general, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA