As some of you may know I've been working with a group of people from Belgium on a Ti-83+ robot. By now the robot has been built, the software has been written and the contest that it was built for is over. So it's time for some publicity
I've sent this information to Ticalc.org, but I don't know if or when they'll feature the news, so I thought I should post it here too. And maybe kv can put it on the calcwebzine if he deems it relevant? Anyway, here's the story.
A few months ago Jurgen van der Velde and his team of students from the VTI Leuven (that's Vrij Technisch Instituut, not Virtual TI
) approached me about connecting a Ti calculator to an external CPU, since they didn't have too much knowledge of the calculator. I still don't really know how he got my address (he got it from 'someone'), but I'm guessing it was because of my tutorial on linking or the Ti-83 robot I've been working on a few years back. I hadn't been coding for the calculator since the year 2003, so I had to start with setting up a decent compile environment, getting Ultra Edit to highlight the syntax of my assembly code and getting back to the Maxcoderz forum to ask questions about the Ti-83+ calculator 
The purpose of the robot is to clean a room with the attached vacuum cleaner, running solely on solar power. Even the calculator gets it's power from the cells that are charged with the solar panel. If I'm not mistaken there are two bumpers on the front that detect collisions with the walls and the solar panel moves independently to face the light. The calculator can control the servos that move the robot and turn the vacuum cleaner on and off.
The Belgian team was building like madmen on their hardware (and I think they did an incredible job at it) while I was struggling to get a calculator I didn't own and that was 400km away to send out the proper signals so the processor they used in the robot could receive the proper byte. After e-mailing about 50 binaries the program finally did what it was supposed to do, and after a short tutorial in Basic and how to use the transfer program they could control their robot.
As mentioned, the robot was built for a contest: www.solarteam.be - Go to Solar Olympics.
They had it working just in time so they could participate, but unfortunately they didn't win. Some weird hothouse thing did, and nobody really understood why
. They were however pretty much the media's favourite, and got some good remarks in the newspapers and on TV:Clicky
The item about the contest starts at 28:07, as you may have guessed from the filename
. The Belgian student says:"This is the solar panel that you see turning to the light, with these two sensors. It is meant to clean garbage, and based on a Ti-83 calculator, which almost every student has in his backpack"
The team is working on a website at the moment, I'll post the link here once they've got it online.
)
