by William Henning
In Part 1 of upgrading the Boe-Bot, I transformed a standard BASIC Stamp 2
based Boe-Bot to a fire breathing dragon — just kidding. I upgraded the whiskers
to distance sensors, added wheel encoders to the wheels, and most important,
replaced the Board of Education with an advanced multi-core 32-bit robot
controller board: RoboProp. Robbie can now avoid ramming into walls and can
run away if chased ... but it would be nice if he could do more than just
randomly wander around the house (and irritate cats chasing him).
In this article, I will show you how to add:
• Infrared remote control so you can drive your robot around.
• Line following sensors so the robot can follow a track.
• A compass so you can tell what direction the robot is facing.
• An infrared range sensor so you can tell how far
FIGURE 1. Robbie with all the features covered in this article.
42 SERVO 10.2011
away the closest object is.
Figure 1 shows what Robbie looks like with the above
infrared remote control
One of the easiest and most useful additions to robots
is the ability to receive infrared remote control commands.
Note the universal remote shown in Figure 2. The original
Boe-Bot kit includes two 38 kHz IR receivers.
Adding an IR remote sensor to RoboProp is very easy.
As a matter of fact, you have a choice of making a movable
sensor or permanently mounting the sensor on RoboProp.
To add a movable sensor, solder the IR sensor onto a
small prototype board, and also solder the male pins of a
three-pin servo extension cable to the appropriate legs. This
way, you can just plug the cable into any of the servo/input
three-pin headers. You can actually mount the IR sensor
PCB anywhere on Robbie!
For a permanent sensor, solder the IR sensor into one
of the two small prototyping areas on RoboProp along with
the male pins of a three-pin servo extension cable. I suggest
bending the sensor so its lens is pointing up at the ceiling.
This way, it can receive IR signals that are bounced off the