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I tried to talk to darren about this on twitter(@valkyries), but this probably got over looked. But i keep hearing you guys talk about some type of battle tanks. Well for the past couple of years we have been building these little tanks that would be programmed by our customers at our trade show then each night they would autonomously drive themselves around and battle other tanks. The Black boxes on the corner of the board are IR receivers(to see the other tanks), the blue diodes are IR transmitter(to let the other tanks now where it is) If there is enough interest I can explain the drive system, the tracking system, its ability to not drive off your playing field, Lithium-ion battery charging system. edit: I forgot the bring up that all the PCB(Gerbers) files will be open for anyone to have and the code should be also open for anyone to use with the pcbs.
the old design uses 8bit MCUs; two on the top and one on the bottom. So the with the old design you would just program the "A.I" and then set it and let it go. The 7 segment displays tell you how many life's you have left and how many rounds your tank has left. You'd get 99 rounds and 9 life's. The tracks and the gear box are made by Tamiya and are about 20$ worth of parts, the rest of the chassis is made from PCB material. The whole system is powered by two Lithium-ion batteries.
Now we are working on the 2009 version of the tank, the biggest change is the tanks are now R/C. But they are driven through a Wifi card built onto the tank. Each tank will also be streaming video, So you now can drive these through your own computer. There are also going to be 8bit and 32bit MCUs, a bit more high tech