I bought a Cyber Spider at Toys R Us one Christmas because it looked cool, it was very cool, but I wanted more. So I removed the IR receiver and controller board and put in one with a PIC 16C84 and a TI 754410 dual motor contoller chip. Recently I did a small run of my IRPD board that didn't have the LED feedback and was very small, I trimmed one of these down and put it in the head of the Cyber Spider and put the PIC controller board back in the body. There just isn't all that much space to work with in this guy! The Cyber Spider uses 4 AAA cells for 6V power. Since the PIC 16C84 can run from 4.5V to 5.5V and so can the PIC12C508A in the IRPD board I put a diode in the circuit and a buffer cap on the PICs side of the power line to drop the voltage and provide brownout protection from motor surge. These motors sip current though, less than 40ma total so there isn't much surge!
The gaits on this guy are fun and really nice, if a bit spooky to watch. I'm not going to put a video in, my bandwidth is getting too high already on this site!
I used the CCS PCM "C" compiler to code this up. Since I was using a C compiler, which generates state saving code for an IRQ program, which is bulky, and I am using a 4MHZ 16C84, which is slow, I got only 4 bits of resolution of PWM for my motors, this was just fine as I really only needed three speeds anyway. I believe in behavioral programming, so this robot shows that coding style like the rest of my robots. Here is the code, enjoy.
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