Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu!ai.toronto.edu!green From: green@ai.toronto.edu (Anthony Thomas Green) Newsgroups: comp.robotics Subject: Re: Sonar/Camera platform Message-ID: <90Jul8.152406edt.8312@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu> Date: 8 Jul 90 19:24:20 GMT References: Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto Lines: 23 ee0i+@andrew.cmu.edu (Ethan Z. Evans) writes: >To those who know: > I need to find two things: A two degree of freedom (pitch and 360 >degree rotation) camera mount, and a good source of moderately priced >ultrasonic rangefinders.... I have no idea about the camera mount, but it seems like THE place to get ultrasonic transducers is from Polaroid. I recently finished building a robot that used one, and it worked suprisingly well. We were able to interface the sonar with our CPU (MC6811) with minimal hardware (a couple of pull up resistors). The only tricky thing about it is that it draws 2.5 AMPS for 100ms every time you make it ping. If you're going to run it off of small batteries, make sure you put a big capacitor across power and ground so as not to affect any other components running on the same batteries. The handbooks provided are a little unclear, so if you have any questions feel free to direct them my way. Anthony Green green@ai.toronto.edu (416) 537-9889