Ran out of the Fire Trucks to mod into robots. Until I get a new source for the basic wired Fire Truck at good cost we have created my last one. This was one of first Picaxe Robots and one of my favorites. The drive and steering motors was about as close to RC quality that would find in a toy like this. It had a small sound and light board that I was able to activate under program control. I started out with 8 pin Picaxes and advanced over the years to include 18MC wire remote control input. The first ones I hardwired the programming serial port cable and wrapped it around the hose racks on the rear of the truck. The nice thing about having a separate circuit running the lights and sounds is that you could activate the circuit and then you could keep running the main program. We call that poor man multitasking. Check out that 5 point turn subroutine. I had just a few of this other model Fire Truck, it had even wider turning ratio. I had to program in 10 point turns to do a 360.
I enjoyed writing programs for a real truck with lots of steps to do a turn. The steering only angled few degrees and I only had a few 100 lines of code for these dinosaurs. I had a small bumper switch that would start the program to do a slow 360. It would randomly drive around and backup and turn around if it hit anything. We upgraded to a detachable programming serial cable.
I will sure miss writing software for that old bus.
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