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Tiggerbot was my first attempt at building a robot, built when I was a freshman in college. I had very limited programming and even less electronics skill at the time, and it showed. It was named in honor of being black, orange, and stupid.


Tiggerbot was built from a Tamiya bulldozer kit, which proved a bit underpowered for all the stuff that was piled on top of it. The treads had very inconsistent performance depending on what type of floor they were on; it could drive straight over anything, but turning didn't really work on carpet.


Tiggerbot had two 4xAA battery packs. The motors were driven by transistor H-bridges, and everything was controlled by a PIC16C74. This was an EPROM device and had to be cooked in UV to be erased. The sensors were a sonar and an infra-red sensor mounted together on a micro-rc-servo as well as a bump sensor. It had a 433MHz AM radio that let it talk to a computer at 4800 baud.

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