Week 1 update:
The SLAMBot project is making progress! I wrote some code, purchased a LIDAR unit and what seems like a poor choice of stepper motors to control a turret.
- The LIDAR unit is working very well and seems to spit out consistent and accurate distances under the limited test conditions I've tried so far.
- The stepper motor turns but is quite slow. It has 64 positions * 64 gears for a total of 4096 positions per revolution, which causes it to be very slow but extremely precise. In hindsight I don't need resolution down to a tenth of a degree, so I will buy a second stepper with fewer gear teeth and a higher rpm.
The arduino code in the project's github repo takes the angle of the turret and the LIDAR measurement, finds the X,Y position of the target, and stores it in an array of obstacles. It's still very much a work in progress, but I'm optimistic about having a working tabletop demo in a week or two. I need to figure out a good way of displaying the data once it's been collected.
Anyone interested in the project is still very much welcome to get in touch and offer suggestions, code, or just talk about ideas. Enthusiasm counts for a lot at this stage in the project and I'm learning a lot about this as I go, so don't worry about having a minimum skill level.