Ben was into soldering, so we bought a Velleman K8055 USB experimentation board kit from Maplin and soldered it up.
Then
we had to figure out what to do with it. It didn't have built in relay circuits, so we couldn't do any house automation
but we did figure we should be able to control our RAD robot from our PC using it.
The kit came
with some software for VB and Delphi, having used Delphi before (about 15 years ago) I thought we would give that a go.
The
first thing was to work out how to control the robot. Having seen ??? do a great job of connecting a PC to the RAD remote
control, we figured that this was the best way forward. First step was to take the RAD remote control apart and work out which
wires to connect where.
Our RAD controller was not quite identical to the one on ???s page
but with a little trial and error wegot the connections sorted.
Then it was a case of designing
a user interface that looked reminiscent of the RAD remote control that would work using mouse or keyboard controls.
Next
to pimp up our RAD we added some components for video display and audio display, then we mounted a wireless camera on RAD
so that we could see what he was shooting at.
The last bit (which is yet to be done) is to have
RAD detect motion or sound and fire on detection (when in guard mode).
