TekBots are programmable robots used by several universities to help students learn some of the fundamental concepts that are found in the fields of computer and electrical engineering.
TekBots are centered on the Atmel microcontroller platform. This is the "brain" of the robot as it controls the robot's two motorized wheels allowing it to move. The robot's controller boards, wheels and all other peripherals are housed in an aluminum base.
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The original TekBots program was developed by the Oregon State University College of Engineering. [2] Professors there wanted to provide a fun and interesting way for students to get excited about engineering. In 2000, the TekBots program was able to get off the ground with a $500,000 grant from the Oregon-based company, Tektronix inc.
Freshman students entering Oregon State University's engineering program start out with $80 worth of electronics to build their initial TekBot. As the students take more and more classes while in the electrical and computer engineering program, more and more functionality is added to the robots; such as bump sensors to sense when the robot has struck a wall or LCD screens to display a message or even infrared (IR) transmitters and receivers to communicate with the robot.
Students program the robot using such software as AVR Studio 4 in order to write and compile a C program. The program is then transferred to the robot via a USB or parallel port dongle.
The TekBots program at Oregon State University is still seed-funded by Tektronix today.
TekBots is currently offered by 5 universities worldwide:
Several community colleges and other universities have also purchased TekBots over the years.
At most of the colleges the TekBot is used in an introduction to the electrical engineering course. At Oregon State they are used as a platform for learning in 10 classes. At Nebraska they are used in three classes in combination with the Mega 128 microcontroller. Also at Rochester they are used in digital logic courses as well as the microprocessor and introduction classes.
Both Nebraska and Oregon State combine the TekBot in integrating a freshman mentoring program.
Many senior design projects at Oregon State are completed with the TekBot. An example was the Tekway, a Segway built using TekBots brains.
AVR is a family of microcontrollers developed since 1996 by Atmel, acquired by Microchip Technology in 2016. These are modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC single-chip microcontrollers. AVR was one of the first microcontroller families to use on-chip flash memory for program storage, as opposed to one-time programmable ROM, EPROM, or EEPROM used by other microcontrollers at the time.
Atmel Corporation was a designer and manufacturer of semiconductors before being subsumed by Microchip Technology in 2016. Atmel was founded in 1984. The company focused on embedded systems built around microcontrollers. Its products included microcontrollers radio-frequency (RF) devices including Wi-Fi, EEPROM, and flash memory devices, symmetric and asymmetric security chips, touch sensors and controllers, and application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), or application-specific standard product (ASSPs) depending on the requirements of its customers.
The AVR Butterfly is a battery-powered single-board microcontroller developed by Atmel. It consists of an Atmel ATmega169PV Microcontroller, a liquid crystal display, joystick, speaker, serial port, real-time clock (RTC), internal flash memory, and sensors for temperature and voltage. The board is the size of a name tag and has a clothing pin on back so it can be worn as such after the user enters their name onto the LCD.
NanoVM is an open-source implementation of the Java virtual machine. The NanoVM was initially developed to run on the Atmel AVR ATmega8 used in the Asuro Robot. It was ported to run on the C't-Bot and the Nibo-robot and can easily be ported to other AVR-based systems.
Parallax Inc. is a privately held company in Rocklin, California. Parallax Inc. designs, manufactures, and sells BASIC Stamp microcontrollers, Propeller microcontrollers, microcontroller accessories, educational robot kits, and educational curriculum.
BOE–Bot is short for Board of Education robot. It is the trade name of a robot kit that is used in junior high, high school and college robotics classes. It consists of a main circuit board and breadboard, a plug–in BASIC Stamp microcontroller, two servo motors to drive the wheels, and an aluminum chassis that the parts bolt onto. Students can use Erector set parts, Lego blocks, and additional servos to build custom projects. The BOE-bot has been manufactured and sold by Parallax Inc since 1998.
Microchip Technology Inc. is a publicly-listed American corporation that manufactures microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP integrated circuits. Its products include microcontrollers, Serial EEPROM devices, Serial SRAM devices, embedded security devices, radio frequency (RF) devices, thermal, power and battery management analog devices, as well as linear, interface and wireless products.
In computing, a resident monitor is a type of system software program that was used in many early computers from the 1950s to 1970s. It can be considered a precursor to the operating system. The name is derived from a program which is always present in the computer's memory, thus being "resident". Because memory was very limited on those systems, the resident monitor was often little more than a stub that would gain control at the end of a job and load a non-resident portion to perform required job cleanup and setup tasks.
Arduino is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed under a CC BY-SA license, while software is licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) or the GNU General Public License (GPL), permitting the manufacture of Arduino boards and software distribution by anyone. Arduino boards are available commercially from the official website or through authorized distributors.
PICkit is a family of programmers for PIC microcontrollers made by Microchip Technology. They are used to program and debug microcontrollers, as well as program EEPROM. Some models also feature logic analyzer and serial communications (UART) tool.
OBDuino is an open source trip computer design based on the Arduino platform. An OBDuino may be assembled and customised by an electronics hobbyist; it displays information such as instantaneous fuel economy, engine tuning parameters etc. on an LCD.
Faustino is a physical computing platform geared towards process monitoring and control. The faustino platform consists of a single-board microcontroller with embedded analog and digital I/O support, an input module with LCD, sensors and actuators in form of solid state relays. The development software is based on Eclipse and WinAVR, a variant of GCC for AVR microcontrollers. For visual presentation of measurements, a XML-configured Windows status monitor application is available.
Ethernut is an open source hardware and software project for use as an embedded-Ethernet-system.
debugWIRE is a serial communications protocol, designed by Atmel. It is used for on-chip debugging of AVR microcontrollers.
The CRX10 is an autonomous mobile robot platform for education, training and research that was developed by South Korean robotics company CNRobot. CRX10 supports MSRDS, SPL, AVR and Android programming languages. The CRX10 was unveiled on May, 2011.
The ATmega328 is a single-chip microcontroller created by Atmel in the megaAVR family. It has a modified Harvard architecture 8-bit RISC processor core.
The Arduino Uno is an open-source microcontroller board based on the Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller and developed by Arduino.cc. The board is equipped with sets of digital and analog input/output (I/O) pins that may be interfaced to various expansion boards (shields) and other circuits. The board has 14 digital I/O pins, 6 analog I/O pins, and is programmable with the Arduino IDE, via a type B USB cable. It can be powered by the USB cable or by an external 9-volt battery, though it accepts voltages between 7 and 20 volts. It is similar to the Arduino Nano and Leonardo. The hardware reference design is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 license and is available on the Arduino website. Layout and production files for some versions of the hardware are also available.
Ebot is a microcontroller unit that is based on open source technology, by two Kuwaiti innovators. Its part of a Prototyping platform called Ebot innovation platform to allow fast and easy prototyping. The platform has received many national and international prizes.
The Oregon State Wireless Active Learning Device (OSWALD) is an open source learning platform developed by students of the Oregon State University to allow undergraduate students of computer science to obtain first experiences through direct technical contribution.
In computing, autonomous peripheral operation is a hardware feature found in some microcontroller architectures to off-load certain tasks into embedded autonomous peripherals in order to minimize latencies and improve throughput in hard real-time applications as well as to save energy in ultra-low-power designs.
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