I’ve just begun piecing together some ideas and parts to be able to make an autonomous robot based on a gas powered truck and an Arduino. The end goal is to have it navigate the world itself by a combination of GPS and avoidance sensors (ultrasonic and/or laser) and stream video and data back to my laptop via XBee within a half-mile range. Click the photo below to see the gallery on flickr. Nothing too exciting yet, but here’s the preliminary idea … much more to come.

My friend gave me an RC car that is gas powered and goes 50+ mph. I got it running this weekend, and this video (not mine) sums up parts of my experience. I will be posting some of my own on-car videos after I get back from a conference.

This motor shield is a kit from Adafruit which goes on to the Arduino and controls servos, stepper motors, and dc motors. I spent to ton of time with it this last weekend, and got some cd rom and floppy stepper motors running.

This is a pile of links about the Arduino open source micro-controller prototyping system:

• Wikipedia Overview
• Official Home Page
• Sparkfun Electronics Product Page
• Creative Commons
• WIRED Magazine Article
• LadyADA Lessons

Like managing inputs and outputs for unplanned results? Here's a bit of background on what Arduino is from the Make Magazine Archive

Arduino is a tool for making computers that can sense and control more of the physical world than your desktop computer. It's an open- source physical computing platform based on a simple microcontroller board, and a development environment for writing software for the board. Arduino can be used to develop interactive objects, taking inputs from a variety of switches or sensors, and controlling a variety of lights, motors, and other physical outputs. Arduino projects can be stand-alone, or they can be communicate with software running on your computer (e.g. Flash, Processing, MaxMSP.) The boards can be assembled by hand or purchased preassembled; the open-source IDE can be downloaded for free.

I'm just getting started with this new high-tech electronic tinkering, but got the book from Amazon yesterday - with this one soon to be ordered]- and am getting some hardware by the end of the week to start my forays into embedded computing. I have a ton of ideas for what I'd like to do with these, including little wireless networking fun with Xbee. Stay tuned to see what's happening here. It's going to be big.