So Explain this WEEGEE thing…

We’ve gotten several people asking about the WEEGEE board and what it is and why we built in. I’ll try to answer that here. First off, it’s a single board computer specifically built as a wireless robot computer. In other words, it’s destined to be the brain in any robot or electronic design that needs to use 2 normal DC motors.

Now why would you use this instead of a Handyboard or a cricket etc? The motor drivers in all other board on the market can only handle pathetic small motors with 1A max current, only 600ma on some of them! We found this unacceptable, there are a lot of cheap motors out there (for instance the ones in Tamiya’s Dual gear box) which just can’t be used without a more capable driver. As such a lot of people buy secondary motor controllers boards for high prices. With the WEEGEE board that’s no longer needed, we built in a full size H-bridge capable of driving up to 3A motors normally, and even more if you add some extra wire to increase the amps they can draw and beef up a heatsink. (The components are rated up to 8A).

In addition our board uses the MaxStream XBEE wireless radio’s. As such anything you build with this can be wirelessly tethered to a computer, or to other XBEE devices including other WEEGEE boards. IE, swarm mode robotics. You can flash your new program code wirelessly to the AVR! You can stream pictures back to a monitoring computer… In short, we added this aspect as we liked the SRV-1’s wireless capability and wanted that without the added bulk of a entire embedded computer running linux which you have to code around.

Using the ATMEGA644P we have 2 serial ports available so while the wireless is using the first port, we have the second port available for a camera module or anything else you want to use it for. We will soon demonstrate using a serial controlled camera.

We also are adding a SD expansion board which will sit right on top of the current weegee board using the 6 pin ISP port. This will allow mass storage for the pictures, mapping, or whatever you need it for. And with future software coding it will be possible to use the SD for program memory!

Please let us know what you think and give us any suggestions you might have.

This entry was written by shadowmite , posted on Monday May 19 2008at 04:05 pm , filed under News . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

Comments are closed.