Time flies, and my brains are getting worse than ever (lost to add this post,had to rewrite it again) ;)

The stepper drivers already came home and are fixed in place.Also i soldered the obstacle bumper wires to their digital inputs.
Next thing to do: power cabling to feed both controller board and efika.

The direction wheel was also finished, and i'm quite happy whith this second design that makes turning around in a very smooth way.

As soon as i find some electronics shop who gives me the rewritable kind of the pic16f745 microcontroller i'll be ready to faster development, otherwise i'll spend lots on replacements.Sigh, i'm not that fresh anymore when it comes to assembler coding.

Photo update

(god, almost lost this second entry, what a scary face i got for a while;))
more to come(hopefully soon)

and yet no electronics finished.
At least the L293 chips appeared at the shop and some coworker who lives near agreed on picking those for me.Next monday i'll get those and mount on the board.
The 3rd wheel also has got a different approach to offer less resistance and better precision when turning around.Will make some photos as soon as possible.

Some time passed, not much progress yet.I'm still unable to get those damn L293E chips around there.

At least the mechanical parts are almost ready, waiting for the battery in place and testing the usb communication between the board and the vehicle.

more photos here

I've built the wheel blocks and the camera rotation block.

Next thing: chassis with efika,usb controller and battery fixed in place.

more photos

Some days passed and i've got a nice 12V rechargeable battery.
Also the Steppers have a way to fix to the chassis now.

Missing items yet:
linux supported webcam.
linux supported pci wireless card (prism2 chipset comes to mind).
90º PCI riser optional.

Few pic16C745 to burn while debugging the usb controller()

progress photos uploaded here

If any good sould can provide with some samples of integrated circuit L293E (3 to be more precise) i would be very grateful(cannot find these locally).

12V Battery.
Webcam.
Some free time again in the weekend.
Wife started English classes again,most home tasks return to me , which is kind of a pain ;-/

Some days ago i got a nice pic16c745 microcontroller, a few chip sockets and a 6mhz oscillator i was missing from my USB stepper controller.
Soldered it, assembled, flashed a test firmware,board works ;).I still have to find some L293E chips that aren't available in the electronic shops i've visited.They keep telling me that i should pick the L293B, which is not what i need, nor what the board layout accepts.at least will try to monitorize the motor movement with some LED's.
Flashed another program to the microcontroller, BAM! Power cut-down, 8Euro to the dust bin.

Now some good sould has sent me a nice donation to my paypal account that let me buy a nice pico-psu power supply and a compact flash ide adapter for my CF card.Thank you M.L!!

Some more photos uploaded here

A new update in the project.
The mailman arrived with a tiny pcb board that will control the steppers via usb interface.
Spent a whole day searching around my town for the components to mount it but christmas dates aren't good for electronics ;).

here are some new pics:

EfikaBot photos

still missing three L293E and sockets to finish the board and start fiddling with the microcontroller code.So far so good i'm left with no money, so planning software part from now.The missing pieces to complete this puzzle are:

-12V battery.
-picoPSU, too expensive to buy right now, will have to test the thing with a standard ATX psu.
-an old usb webcam, preferrably one widely supported by linux.
compactflash-ide adaptor, haven't found anything locally yet.
-wireless pci card,prism2 alike or anything that works under linux.a pci riser would be very welcome.
optional addons:
-an old microphone.Just because ;)
-small audio amplifier circuit to allow it to speak.

I accept old/unused hardware donations to finish it faster ;)

Next week i should start shaping out the chassis.

In the meanwhile i've managed to get some stepper motors from several old printers and two nice track wheels.Next thing, stepper controller.

Efika Robot project

The little tiny tourist efika came home finally ;)

the package was perfect,board quality is good as well.
Unfortunately i've only got a huge 200Mb hardisk that doesn't let me try it with a graphics card.The output serial info claims that it works, however ;).

Efika robot Album