The Plan (as of now…)
The current state of HERO 1
What I currently know about HERO 1 –
- He turns on
- He holds a charge for about 15 minutes
- All of his components are intact and there has been no physical damage to him
What I currently do not know about HERO 1
- Does everything function to the full degree.
- What may not be working due to having sat for years without any attention
The general plan
HERO 1 consists of 12 boards.
- I/O
- CPU
- Display
- Experimental
- Sense
- Sonar Transmit
- Sonar Receive
- Main Drive
- Arm Drive
- Power Supply
- Speech
- Logic
As the electronics are from the 80’s, most of the electronics can probably be reduced to the size of a postage stamp today! Eventually, the goal is to progressively redesign and replace all of the boards – but initially, I want to replace his brain with either a Raspberry Pi, or something similar. That will allow me to to run Linux on him, and use WiFi to communicate with him. The CPU (and probably logic?) boards will be removed or bypassed. Each existing board will be extended to have an Arduino (or the like) controller manage it. Each Arduino will be programmed in isolation with the board it is to control. Additionally, each Arduino will be a I²C slave to the Raspberry Pi master. A protocol will be developed for each board so that the Raspberry Pi only needs to know the protocol of the interface board and the whole setup can be controlled with only the Serial Clock Line (SCL) and Serial Data Line (SDA) as prescribed by I²C. At least that’s the plan…
