New Top Tron

after setting the burning man on fire early, the ChakraTron burned out his third eye. Or, in this case, the 6th tron on the armature. So i had to completely rebuild it.

the main support had snapped, and the power rings had twisted loose. So here it is, all done nice and balanced, ready for robogames.

New Brain

so, zworld just wasnt that cooperative, and when my pc laptop w/ the rabbit control sw got stolen, it was time to make the jump. an easy jump. very easy. to gcc on my mac, even got the xcode IDE mostly working.

So here she is, Atmel ATMega16, 8k fifo, and a pic f636

all hand wired, includes 48vdc-5vdc power converter, touch sensor input header, diagnostic leds, pickup points for oscilloscope watching, 16mhz crystal, and even red led hex display to show the hand sensor status.

ugh. me stuffem tite!

ChakraTron Hand V2.0

the hand just didnt stand up to the elements, so i cast a solid one with imbedded fiber optic lines and touch sensors.

the boards on the left are the touch sensor chips by Qprox, two 5'ers are clock synced to give 10 seperate channels.

8 L3K modules are attached at the wrist and feed into the fiberoptic lines that run to the palm and fingers. It was a tight fit, and the fiber was too close to the optical density of the casting resin so the fiber "blurred". Its not the effect i really wanted, but given the cost of the mold and cast, i guess i'll live with it.

so there are 8 sensors total, and each zone can display 512 discrete colours. The sensitivity is such that even just being close to the fingers will trigger. Its kinda ghostly to just wave close to the hand and see the lights follow

one for each finger and the thumb,
the heart line
the life line, and the last for the head line.
other pics

126 processors,
360 LEDs,
5 rotation points,
< 2A@48VDC (less than a 100w lightbulb including motors)

trons 1 and 2, and the primary highvoltage cap for the main commutator.
check out the re-mounted power/battery box.
wtop 3 chakras outside the shell.