Build Your Own Combat Robot

Handy Board
BotBoard
Chapter 12: Robot Brains 267
The Handy Board is a powerful veteran microcontroller board that has been
around for a long time. First developed at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
by Fred Martin, this microcontroller board uses the popular 68HC11
microcontroller from Motorola. The programming environment is called Interactive
C, which is similar to the traditional ANSI C. This microcontroller has four
built-in motor controllers for directly driving four different very-low-current
(< 1.0 amps) motors, and it has a built-in liquid crystal display (LCD) screen for
displaying information.
The BotBoard was developed by Kevin Ross and Marvin Green using the same
68HC11 microcontroller used by the Handy Board.The size of this board is significantly
smaller, however, and it doesn’t have the built-in features of the Handy
Board. Because many people didn’t want those extra features, this board offers a
smaller and lower-cost solution to obtain the same level of power of the Handy
Board. Karl Lunt has developed a version of the Basic programming language for
the 68HC11 microcontrollers, which is called Sbasic. You can download it from
Karl’s Web site at www.seanet.com/~karllunt/. Karl is also the author of an excellent
book about robots called Build Your Own Robot (see Appendix B).
Other Microcontrollers
Many other microcontrollers are out there. The OOPic uses an object-oriented
programming language. The BasicX-24 and Basic Micro’s Atom look almost like the
Basic Stamp and are pin-for-pin compatible, but are faster, have more programming
space, and uses a multitasking operating system. These microcontrollers are
starting to gain a lot of popularity. A high-end microcontroller is the Robominds
microcontroller, which uses the Motorola 68332, 32-bit microcontroller. It’s very
fast and very powerful.
Most of the microcontroller boards described here use either the Microchip
PICs, the Atmel AVR chips, or the Motorola 68HC11 or 68HC12 chips as the
core microcontroller. All of these microcontroller board companies have added
some components to their boards to make their microcontrollers easy to use.
When you get more experienced with microcontrollers, try experimenting directly
with the PICs and the AVR chips. They are the microcontrollers found in most
electronic appliances and systems.