Using a NetMedia BasicX-24 with a TAB Build Your Own Robot Kit

Mabuhay! Magandang Gabi. Pwede BX-24 ba? Hindi, walang na. Pero...

If you'd be interested in our new TiniPod(TM), you'd need to pick up quadrature off the motors, but then I could give you examples that would implement velocity profiled, acceleration limited PID routines, with Odometry and drive-to-a-point Navigation.

Salamat Po

(Robots are easy... but learning a little Tagalog! now that was about the hardest thing I ever tried in my life.)

There is a Yahoo group that supports the TAB robot kit. The two "authors" of the kit, Myke Predko and Ben Wirz, both hang out there. The support Web site for the kit contains a pointer to the Yahoo group.

In any case, it should be fairly straight-forward, but I'd suggest adding a new H-bridge for the motors, so you have full specs and working dynamics. You would then basically not use the electronics that came with kit, only the mechanics. I see little sense in using the on-board PIC even. It may limit what you want to do.

-- Gordon

I was looking at some reviews, as I've never paid much attention to the kit (because of the bad reviews I'd heard before), and it said they had used some hundred pages from your book.

How involved were you with this project?

At the end not at all. The publisher originally came to me to put the kit together, and I worked out a design that was fairly different than what Prekdo and Wirz came up with. It did use a pre-programmed PIC as a brain with the option of a BS2. Mine was much more BEAMish, which is funny because I'm not really a BEAM-type of guy. However, I felt a BEAM design was more in keeping with the price-point I was aiming at, which was $39.

The publisher and I have an agreement that we can "re-purpose" material for certain uses -- up to 10% in my case, without sharing revenue with them. I felt the PDF pages from RBB were a fair trade in return. I don't get a share of the kit profits, in other words.

-- Gordon Author: Constructing Robot Bases, Robot Builder's Sourcebook, Robot Builder's Bonanza

I see. Sorry to stir a possibly unpleasant memory. :(

So, wouldn't a BX-24 drop right in? And since they're both Basic, wouldn't the programs be similar? perhaps interchangeable?

Randy, The BX-24 and Basic Stamp 2 aren't drop-in compatible on a software/programming basis, and that's what counts. It's true that the form-factor is the same, and the pin functionality is the same. As we know, there's more to it than X pin being Vcc and Ground, and some other pins being I/O.

My memory of the way the Tab kit works is that the BS2 "commands" the on-board PIC, which in turn is connected to the motors. With some reverse engineering I don't see why a BX-24 couldn't send commands to the PIC, the same way the BS2 does. A person would have to revise the example code from PBASIC to BasicX.

-- Gordon Author: Constructing Robot Bases, Robot Builder's Sourcebook, Robot Builder's Bonanza