I am having a problem communicating with my Olimex P-40 board with Atmega32 to my PC.
About 3 months ago, I decided to build a balancing robot. Considering I didn’t know anything about microcontrollers, I decided to start with Parallax’s Basic Stamp 2. I could only work on it at night and weekends. So it took me a while to make the robot balance.
On August 4th, my robot was able to balance on two wheels using Memsic 2125 accelerometer and about 100 lines of PBASIC codes. It was able to balance itself even when pushed on either side within seconds. The robot is about 3-4 pounds because of the heavy gearmotors, battery, Colson wheels, and flexiglass. However, the code should still work with minimum hardware of MCU, Memsic 2125, board, servos, and servo wheels.
Usually people who are able to balance their robot do not share their polished codes, but I’ll give it to anybody who wants it. The bulk of the work was not about trying to make the robot balance but actually making the codes simple. That’s because I had to get around some of the signed arithmetic limitations by BS2. The software is really simple enough to be followed by anybody line by line and initial variables could be changed easily as well without having to learn a single programming code. Considering the simplicity, anybody should be able to reproduce the same results by easily changing 2 initial lines.
Now, I want to improve the robot to make it wander around and still keep its balance. This means adding a gyroscope and adding more codes. Considering the expensive cost of Parallax MCUs, I decided to use Atmega32 instead.
A week ago, I bought an Olimex 40 Pin AVR Development Board SKU # Dev-00031 using a serial port from Sparkfun and an AVR 40 Pin 16Mhz 32K Atmega32. I even got a wall adapter power supply from Fry’s yesterday. I got the latest AVR Studio running and even debugged a small sample “led” program without any errors. However, when trying to physically communicate my computer with the board, it seems to “fail.” I’ve been trying to connect it for several days now and I even joined the AVR Freaks site. In other words, I need a step by step help to start me out. Once I got this thing done, I’ll try to learn C and post my codes for anybody who would like to make their own balancing robot. Thanks in advance.
-Alfred