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Welcome to the Wireless ECE Bot Project
A project submitted by Dr. Richard Wolff, ECE professor at Montana State, it was awarded an NWACC Grant in May 2004.
>> Read the grant proposal here
The goals of this NWACC grant are to develop an 802.11 b/g wireless
interface for the Montana State University mobile robot, to install the
complementary wireless infrastructure in our teaching labs, and to modify the
curriculum of our microcomputer software engineering course, EE371
Microprocessor Hardware and Software Systemsto incorporate robot-centered
instruction. This will enable the students to program and control the mobile
robot in real time over the wireless network and to measure outcomes in real
time. These additions will be leveraged by other courses in communications and
control systems in the future.
The mobile robot is currently used in our
basic first year introductory engineering course, EE101, where students learn
engineering skills by constructing and testing the roving robots. Our
intention is to actively engage promising young engineering students in the
fields of electronics, robotics and embedded computer systems-areas of
ever-increasing importance to this nation's goals in communications,
transportation, and space exploration. Since Because each of our students will
now have a mobile and programmable robot, we can capitalize on their experience
by utilizing the robots as a teaching platform in subsequent courses.
Specifically, we propose to incorporate wireless communication technology
between the robots and laptop or tablet computers to support student learning in
communications, embedded systems, and control.
From a related Senior Project:
Overall Goal: Use a mature wireless technology, such as 802.11, to
build a radio system and provide robot-to-robot communication and
robot-to-stationary controller communication, without being dependent
on a base station.
- write software for the stationary controller and any additional
hardware to manage IP addresses and allow for an "ad hoc" system.
- establish and document the methods of wireless communication for
groups to use in the future.
- software should set up the ability to send simple commands throughout
the system to different components.
- an educational tool
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Parts
Requirements and Project Layout
We've made a number of design
desisions to
enable the project to go forward. The EZL-80 from Sollae, a
Prism
2.5 compatible PCMCIA card, a PCMCIA socket from Digikey, the CSM12C32
module from Motorola, and a CAN transceiver basically make up the
system that will allow us to communicate to the robot microcontroller
>>
more information
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The ECE Bot
Project
The ECE Bot is becoming a major part
of the
curriculum of the ECE department at Montana State University.
View the EE 101 webpage and see how the robot is being
integrated
into classroom learning.
>>
EE 101 Robot Page
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