If I only had a brain

As promised, I have made some changes to the robobuilder source files so that movement commands execute properly.

The problem seemed to be that the wCK transmit interrupt was being disabled prematurely, before all of the instructions could be sent. General defensive programming practice on behalf of the designers meant that any function which placed commands into the transmit buffer intentionally waited patiently until the buffer was empty. This avoided accidentally fragmenting the instructions due to the limited size of the buffer, but meant that the program would just freeze up if (for whatever reason) the transmissions were not being sent.

With a little debugging, I identified the MakeFrame() function as the culprit, which was causing the program to get stuck waiting for the transmit queue to clear, but since the interrupt was disabled it stayed in an infinite loop. Simply placing a few lines inside the while loop making sure that the interrupts were enabled fixed the problem.

I also made a few other aesthetic changes - mostly making things more readable by replacing "magic numbers" with the names of registers. For the uninitiated, A |= (1<<X) means 'set' bit X in register A, while A &= ~(1<<X) will 'clear' the bit. The header file iom128.h in avr-libc contains the names of all the registers.

Overall, the code here is a very good starting point if you want to start messing around with your robobuilder's brain. However, the functions do a LOT of polling, which should be replaced with interrupt based timing control if you plan to implement more complicated functions.

The files can be found here. I apologise for the horrible free hosting service. Be sure you click on the "Free" tab before you hit download.

My next goal is to figure out how the recharging procedure works, and give the robot some sort of power management routine. Perhaps eventually he will be able to detect when his batteries are dying and go recharge himself.