How the Avoider uses IR.
Like I said, it is setup to run both motors from its supply voltage (four AA's inside the case.) When it sees an obstacle, one of the motors is shut off by the IR detectors. I can't remember which direction it turned when it came "out of the box", but it is easy enough to swap the motor connections so it turns the other direction.
Figure 1. The Avoider Microrobot is a cute little guy.
At the time I was learning about Motor Controllers, so I decided to grab a handful of 2N3904's and 6's and made my own motor control. Now I could tell the little bot to go forward and backwards, just by setting the right pins high.
Next enhancement had to do with adding a chip to control it all. I first tinkered with NE-555's and other chips, but in my heart I knew I wanted to use a Microprocessor, so I looked around and decided to spring for the PIC chips with built-in BASIC interpreter - picAxe was the choice. I liked the 8 pin package and that gave me plenty of outputs and one input pin to drive an interrupt. The result? It looks pretty ugly, but it's one of the more reliable "bots" sitting around here.
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