Cybot - the Real Robots Magazine Kit Robot.

In September 2001 Eaglemoss released a new fortnightly magazine called Ultimate Real Robots, what makes this magazine special is that it provides you all the parts to build your own working robot!. You can get more details from the Real Robots Website, but their BBS Forums are pretty useless, hosted by a third party (apparently in Germany) they are extremely slow and unreliable. Various privately run forums have sprung up to take it's place, the best of which is at CybotBuilder, this uses a self written PHP BBS, it's fast, reliable, and easy to use.

So far Real Robots has not supplied any technical details on the workings of Cybot, so there are various sites which attempt to do so - this is one of them!. As Cybot is supplied in fortnightly pieces, it takes a long time for it to grow to do anything useful, to that end I've (so far) provided a full circuit diagram and description of the motor driver board (supplied in issue 4), the Light I/O board (issue 8), the Processor 1 board (issue 9), the Line Following Sensor (issue 12), the Processor 2 board (issue 13), and some preliminary thoughts on the Sonar I/O board (due in issue 14) and I've designed a small PIC16F84 processor board, UHF FM R/C receiver and transmitter boards, an IR obstacle avoidance system, and written example software for them all.

Laurence Hunter kindly send me some pictures of the boards, taken with his Fuji digital camera, you can see them here - he's promised to send me pictures of the later boards as he receives them!.

PIC Board - a simple 16F(C)84 PIC based controller board, allows you to pre-program a sequence of moves for an issue 4 Cybot.

Radio RX Board - a new version of the PIC board with a UHF data receiver added, example software is now available for download.

Radio TX Board - a prototype test transmitter for providing a test bed for writing the software, it's built on a prototype board, but the circuit for a standalone version is given. This completes the hardware for the remote control, further developments are likely to be solely in the software, a number of working versions of which can be downloaded.

Obstacle avoidance - another PIC based add on for Cybot, I've added an Infra Red detection system to the Radio RX board.

From issues of Real Robots so far it appears to be basically a kit of parts for Cybot, plus a very thin magazine, however it does have some interesting content - in particular I find the section written by Rex Garrod on building a light weight 'Robot Wars style' fighting robot extremely interesting. If time allows I'd quite like to build one of these!. The section describing various top Robot Wars machines is also very interesting, it's nice to be given some idea of the reasoning behind these machines, and how they managed to overcome (or not!) problems they met during development.