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Bots / The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 5

94 The Ultimate Palm Robot

C ongratulations! By this point, you should have a completely assembled
robot. If you’re like Dave, you’ll also have a small collection of spare
parts that actually outnumber the original components you started
with, an incinerated tablecloth from the soldering, and a cat that now needs a
considerable amount of therapy. That may not sound good, but you should
have seen him try to build his own PC.

So far, so good. Insert the batteries into the battery holder, flip the switch to
the on position, and watch that robot go! All hail the mighty robot! Robot, go!
Go, robot, go!

Oops, sorry … not quite yet. You’re still missing one vital piece of the puz-
zle: the robot’s software. The software tells your hardware what to do, how to
do it, and how frequently it should do it. Without a little programming, your
bot simply isn’t going to do much. That’s why, in this chapter, we’ll show
you some places where you can get some software that will allow you to start
playing with your PPRK (Palm Pilot Robot Kit).

Software for the PPRK
Because of the great interest in the PPRK, a number of web sites have posted
sample software for the robot. The two obvious places are the original PPRK
web site and Acroname, but a few other sites are out there as well. In this sec-
tion, we’ll look at some places where you can get sample code for the PPRK.
Then we’ll use some of this sample code to test the PPRK. Although you can
download all the code from the web, don’t bother; you’ll find all the software
on the CD-ROM that’s attached to the back of this book.

TIP: If you built a robot using the BrainStem controller, you’ll want to jump
to the next major section of this chapter, “Software for the BrainStem.”

Software from Carnegie Mellon

The Carnegie Mellon PPRK web site (www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~pprk) contains a
small but useful section of software to get your PPRK up and running. Click
the Software link in the left column to get to the software page.

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Monday, May 12, 2003 4:06:08 PM