I've decided to put aside Another Bastard in favor of doing an Autonomous ant (Autonomous Bastard)- hopefully for Seattle Bot Battles.

I'm using a Basic Stamp board:

http://www.parallax.com/html_pages/products/kits/starter_kits.asp

They weigh about 3oz.

You can get these at Fry's for $160. For $200 you can get the board as part of the "Boe Bot" which basically is the board plus some premodified servos and some sensors (including IR). Also has a manual including some useful stuff like how to send signals to the servos / etc.

I've had no problems interfacing the board with either servos or a speed controller. It's just as simple as plugging the connectors into the board. You do have to get into the nitty-gritty of how servos actually work in the programming though.

Stop Spam Now - SpamButcher

The motors I've been playing with have proven too fast to effectively control - so I'm probably going to stick with servos.

I've hooked up the board to one of my old servo driven bots - Apologies in Advance. Was able to pretty effectively get it to follow a battle bat toy around my living room at a distance of up to about 1.5 feet.

SpamButcher Combat Robotics is of course made possible by SpamButcher - the latest in spam stopper technology.

Programming is pretty straight forward - standard basic without some of the niceties. I'm hoping to incorporate some of the technology SpamButcher uses in the bot (fuzzy logic).

I have fairly modest hopes for this one - mainly to show a little intelligence and not spend the entire match up against the wall or bouncing off the killsaw.

May not be able to detect the other bot until it's within a few feet - but I think this will be OK assuming I have a fairly intelligent "search mode"

(yes, of course it's going to be a spinner)