Building and Programming an Asuro Robot in Linux?

0R35T35 asks: "I'm currently in the process of building an Asuro mobile robot, and am startled to find (through Google) that there aren't any English speaking community sites for this robot kit. Does anyone know of sites or resources devoted to this cute little guy, or have an Asuro of their own?"

Don't Mod Parent Up!

[fm6]

I can say that 'cause I wrote it. I was just pointing out something that should have been obvious. Save your mod points for posts that matter.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Anybody else getting really annoyed by these shoot-from-the-hip posters who assume that a simple Google search will answer any question?

Please point out an English forum in your results. I see several non-english forums, a German forum but no English forums.

Mod this parent up

[aitikin]

I agree in full

Re:Sigh

[fm6]

I don't think a Google search can answer any question. But the ones it can answer don't belong in Ask Slashdot.

I have just the site for you:

[Anonymous Crowhead]

This should help. [deutsch-lernen.com]

Old idea.

[babbling]

It's already been done before. [ubergeek.tv]

Three words.

[Orrin Bloquy]

Best. Prom. Ever.

Well... I can give you something close

[technoextreme]

Heheheh... After reading through the instructions I realized what microcontroller it ran on. The microcontroller itself has a very large following. Im sure these people will help you program your little bitty robot. http://www.avrfreaks.net/index.php?POSTNUKESID=17f 53fb2c3f81f15a81c3e573d6d8bbc [avrfreaks.net]

This right here

[Scrameustache]

The microcontroller itself has a very large following.

This is why I come to slashdot : )

Re:Well... I can give you something close

[sophanes]

I couldn't find any reference to what type of Atmel microcontroller this project uses - I guess it must be one of the smaller ones considering the amount of flash is an issue. But yeah, the Atmel series of microcontrollers is great to play around with, particularly the ATMEGA128.

Re:From the linked blog...

[topham]

Nothing wrong with it; but...

"serial connection can only send characters". Perhaps (A guess I admit) he means 7 bit characters. In which case sending binary data is a pain in the butt. base64 to the rescue if that's the case.

Re:From the linked blog...

[sophanes]

Depends. From what I can gather, the author is trying to send an array of integers to the serial port. To do this, the uC forms a character string from the array of integers using sprintf() then sends the string. This is a pretty inefficient way of doing things (particularly given the bloat in avr-libc's string handling).

A much better idea would be to set the USART to use 8 data bits and then send the array 1 byte at a time - trivial if you are using 8-bit integers, but requires a 16-bit integer to be sent

Re:From the linked blog...

[topham]

I know, I've done it myself 15 years ago. (serial communications mostly limited to PCs, I really dislike 8250's and all their variants, tons of bugs and each chip a bit different than the last.). (Debugging a communications Library I paid for wasn't my idea of fun either.).

I really wanted to give the guy the benefit of the doubt; but in this case I think you're right.

There is no way you should be able to solder together a micro-robot, compile the tools necessary to write code and write some actual code for

start one!

[dopez]

How about starting a community?

I also found out that there aren't much english forums or websites for the Asuro, though Arexx does have an english forum for their robot : http://www.arexx.com/forum/index.php?c=5&language= english [arexx.com]

But i found out most of the people at http://www.roboternetz.de/phpBB2/index.php [roboternetz.de] wouldn't mind to answer a few questions in english once in a while. (though you might want to babelfish a few words to figure out which forum to post in)

I though already to start a site or