> - Sonar is affordable and small enough to apply to wearables. > I have a mobile robot with 16 sonar modules around its > circumference. It can wander around here without crashing > into anything (I let it wander once for about 8 hours > and it was hilarious. It would roam between the kitchen, > living room and hallway, sometimes staying in a room for > 15 minutes at a time. However it's unaware of low-lying > obstacles like small and short items and cords. It has > never run into a wall although it does get caught on things > sometimes, and can also get confused and unable to find > its way out of certain locations. This can be fixed by > adding more sensors. It uses the polaroid 6500 sonar > ranging modules, and a 68332 microcontroller interfaced > to a pc/104 main controller. I am planning to put one of > these sonar modules on the back of my jacket so I can sense > when someone walks up behind me (not very practical but > should be fun and a good demo). When used in arrays these > modules are a form of radar, though short range. It would > not be hard to interface the 6500s to a BasicX micro and > connect that to a serial port. Check these out: > The other side of the problem is essentially telemetry, > which is also a widely scoped field. If the sensors reside > somewhere other than on the wearable, transmission of data > could be done with ricochet, CDPD/CDMA, 802.11, bluetooth, > or a variety of other radio applications. One of the things > we discussed very briefly at last night's SF meeting was > packet radio. This has great potential for tracking apps > since it allows much greater power and flexibility than > generally available radio communications, and does not > require FCC (or equivalent) licensing, just an amateur > radio license. Your robot sounds very cool. Do you have a webpage about it? If so, what? As far as sonar, Mondotronics (http://www.robotstore.com) sells a small kit with a servo, polaroid sonar module and PC interface with software to move the sonar sensor around and map the area (distances from the sensor in a 170 degree radius). This could be used for mapping functions as well as some other fun stuff. About packet mail, I read in wired's nostalgia computing article that quite a few people are still using the old Tandy 100's and 101s for packet mail. So clearly you could do this with little computing power, or have it running in the background and it wouldn't interfere with anything, or make a major draw on the processor so you could do MP3 or anything else while it is working. ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com -- Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with subject of "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" toWear-Hard Mailing List Archive (searchable): http://wearables.blu.org
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