AIM

This project, Computer Controlled Car(CCC), is a continuing project. It has been on development since 1998. In previous years, a basic prototype has been developed with sufficient functionality that a computer is able to control the movement of a RF remote controlled car at low speed.
This year(2000), I will attempt to further enhance the existing model both in terms of software and hardware.
My initial goal is to establish an interface with a IBM compatible PC. This is one of our fundamental objectives. As identified by Tim in 1999, one of the bottlenecks causing the slow speed is due to the time expensive frame grabbing operation on a Silicon graphics INDY machine. By interfacing our existing prototype with a IBM PC (ie. PII), we can guarantee that this bottleneck can be largely reduced if not eliminated.

a gear box
multiple cars

The logical steps for establishing a PC interface are:

(1) Purchasing a frame grabber device This device accepts a video-in signal and converts them into images, which would then be transferred directly to some memory locations. Later on, track identification and position mapping would be performed based on those image sequences.
(2) Re-establishing a (computer to remote controller) Interface. On our prototype version, the link between computer and remote controller utilises a DIN-8 wire along with some circuitry. A DIN-8 interface is not very common on IBM compatible PC. A RS-232 interface would have to be utilized instead.
(3) Setting up Linux to interface to both (1) and (2) Interfacing a frame grabber with a PC is a difficult task due to very limited documentations and technical manuals. Again, our objective is speed! We need a sufficiently fast platform that enables us to perform track id and navigation control.