laptop based robot

[kashi]

how can i make a pc(laptop) controlled robot? i don have a printer port in my laptop. i have only usb or bluetooth. the robot is to be controlled through the visual basic... i am an ee engineering student and i have the basic knowledge to build the robot... plz guide me guyz.... i also found a usb to parallel adapter can i use that...

 

[arhi]

how can i make a pc(laptop) controlled robot? i don have a printer port in my laptop. i have only usb or bluetooth. the robot is to be controlled through the visual basic... i am an ee engineering student and i have the basic knowledge to build the robot... plz guide me guyz.... i also found a usb to parallel adapter can i use that...

It depends on what do you want to achieve. If you want to use PC as "controller" you can use one of the bluetooth or zigbee modules for communication between PC and electronics on a robot. You can find BT or zigbee modules for ~50$, I do not have much experience with zigbee but BT you see as a serial connection to the PC so you need to program your robot controller to respond to commands issued via serial port and to send feedback via same line.

If you want to embed the laptop in the robot, you will again need some way to control peripherals (for e.g. drive motors). For that you can use simple usb->par port adapter (will give you some 8-10 lines you can control, programming would be easy but timing precision will not be too high hence it all depends on what you need)... on the other hand, you can use some of the FTDI DIP modules ( DLP-2232PB-G is my favorite - **broken link removed** ) to make it simple and control everything from there - it has 16F877 on board that you can program via usb so no external programmer needed... the other way is to make your own usb enabled controller with some usb enabled uC like 18F4550... there are many examples on how to program it, there is free SE edition microchip c compiler (mcc18)...

Whatever way you choose, you will have to have some additional electronics, you cannot drive a motor from laptop you have to make or purchase motor driver... controlling that driver you can do from laptop (trough par port or trough some micro controller) ... the benefit of the lap would just be "high processing power" and "large storage area" so it would be simple to add camera, voice generator, voice recogniser, even some shape recogniser as you are not limited with ram and cpu speed like you are with cheep uC's

hope this helps