A new Big Brain for your Penguin
Hundreds of programs have already been written for the Penguin; each of them gives him a specific ability. Each time you want to make your Penguin behave in a different way, however, you have to turn your Penguin off, connect him TO a PC, load another program, disconnect him from the PC and finally get him doing what you wanted. Now, instead, you can simply load once this Big Brain program and then enjoy many of the best Penguin behaviours without reconnecting him to the PC.
In this way the Penguin is finally free; he is not a slave of the PC anymore. He can autonomously sing, dance, walk, navigate toward the light, migrate North, play a radio station, according to what you ask him.
If you want to run some different behaviour, however, it's easy to replace any of these programs with other Penguin programs of your choice.
The Big Brain leverages the great power of the BS2PX microcontoller, by defining a Main Program and 6 Dependent Programs. The Main Program, which act as a menu, allows you to tell the Penguin what to do, and is loaded in slot 0.
According to your choice, it loads the EEPROM page (1 through 6), containing the Dependent Program corresponding to the selected behaviour.
You can download the Big Brain program from the page www.p-robot.com/index.php/other.html .
Download the zip file in a folder on your PC; then load the program Penguin_Big_Brain_v10.bpx in the Basic Stamp Editor. It will automatically load also the 6 Dependent programs. Please follow the instructions contained in the main program.
Post Edited (vrossi) : 8/21/2009 5:54:49 PM GMT
In this way the Penguin is finally free; he is not a slave of the PC anymore. He can autonomously sing, dance, walk, navigate toward the light, migrate North, play a radio station, according to what you ask him.
If you want to run some different behaviour, however, it's easy to replace any of these programs with other Penguin programs of your choice.
The Big Brain leverages the great power of the BS2PX microcontoller, by defining a Main Program and 6 Dependent Programs. The Main Program, which act as a menu, allows you to tell the Penguin what to do, and is loaded in slot 0.
According to your choice, it loads the EEPROM page (1 through 6), containing the Dependent Program corresponding to the selected behaviour.
You can download the Big Brain program from the page www.p-robot.com/index.php/other.html .
Download the zip file in a folder on your PC; then load the program Penguin_Big_Brain_v10.bpx in the Basic Stamp Editor. It will automatically load also the 6 Dependent programs. Please follow the instructions contained in the main program.
Post Edited (vrossi) : 8/21/2009 5:54:49 PM GMT
Comments
documented, code addition to the Penguin Robot
Suite of software! It provides successful examples
of a new way to combine Penguin programs and
extend the Brain Power of Penguin for the first time.
This code structure will lead to more artificial
intelligence for Penguin, and greatly expand the
user panel of available capabilities. Job well done!
humanoido
It can now be used without any change in the Dependent programs and without any additional hardware circuit. It's now really Plug And Play !
Here are some new features in Version 1.1:
* No need for additional pushbutton, since it uses the standard reset button.
* No constraints on the programs to be added in pages 1 through 6. Any penguin program can be loaded in each of these 6 memory pages .
* No change needs to be done to these programs. Any of them can just be loaded as is.
The zip file contains the Big Brain program, together with 6 Parallax and Humanoido's programs, in order to give you immediately a working example. However you can simply define your 6 programs menu according to your preferences.
To change the menu and make any existing program work as a Dependent Program of Big Brain, you simply have to do the following:
1. Load the desired program in the same folder as BigBrain.
2. Change the $STAMP directive in BigBrain (line 156), replacing the current Dependent Programs names with the exact names of your preferred programs.
That's all!
One note about the calibration locations in EEPROM. Big Brain 1.1 adopts the original values defined by Parallax and used in all Humanoido's programs. If you prefer to use the different locations, later changed by Parallax, simply swap the comments in the following lines:
'CenterOffset CON DataOffset + 8
CenterOffset CON DataOffset
You find Big Brain 1.1 attached here, or you can download it from www.p-robot.com/index.php/other.html
Let me know your comments about this new version.
Post Edited (vrossi) : 8/21/2009 5:50:27 PM GMT
Very good popularization of the multiple memory
page concept which will allow more use of the
many wonderful Penguin programs already
available. It will be interesting to mix and match
program sets, such as various ways to walk,
or a group of security programs, etc.
humanoido