Short technical description of Snuf.
Its body is a simple aluminum groundplate, mounted with 2 geared DC motors. Together with a 1.2 Ah 12V Pb accu the groundplate is almost fully occupied. On top of this construction a i386 board (own design) is located: CPU clock of 25MHz, 128k static RAM, a RS232 serial port and two 8-bit parallel ports. Several sensors are used, a front bumper, two pairs of IR-choppers for wheel rotation counting, a forward directed ultra sound transmitter/receiver for object detection. Snuf displays its deeper thoughts on a 2*16 characters LCD screen. Programs are written in C++ (now using Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0) on my PC. The binaries are downloaded to Snuf using a serial port. A remotely controlled kernel is booting these Win32 programs. This small kernel is written in assembler.

Building Snuf itself was not a big deal, most of the effort was put in developing the i386 board (including a programming device for GAL's), and developing the software-basics for downloading and booting Win32 programs. I encountered a lot of problems in this area, mainly because of the fragmented and incomplete documentation on parts and software. Now this work is done, I'm focussing on an object oriented controlling system for Snuf.

Email: j.havinga@planet.nl