Senior Design Project

Welcome to my Senior Design Project page.  Here is a short description of the design the group and myself are currently working on:

This project's original goal is to design and construct a solution to a problem or idea students develop to demonstrate the understanding of concepts discussed and learned throughout the university's education.  My group really just wanted to build a robot (isn't this the coolest dream of any group of engineers?), so we decided to do just that.  What sets this robot apart from others is it's unique client el: Dog Owners.  Ultimately, this robot will allow users, dog owners, to play with their dogs while away from home over the internet.  They will be able to interact with the robot and visually identify with the dog.  The main goal (at this time) is to control a two-axis, motorized hamster ball wirelessly over the internet.  This robot will eventually be encased in a "kong-like" rubber, vary similar to the dog toys of the same name, thus making it "dog-proof."

At this time, I have finally been able to get two XBee Series 1 Modems to communicate appropriately, the computer as the coordinator and an Arduino as the end device.  I will post directions on how to do this later.  I was quite surprised to find in my research of the XBee modules, how few tutorials or even how little information on how they function.  One could read the manual and learn what all the abbreviations mean, but still not be able to have complete communication.  At any rate, I am able to pass integers through the computer to the Arduino using the Serial.read() function and a for loop in conjunction with the atoi() function to calculate the integer values (from 0 to 9999).