Continuing our efforts to make our manuals available in digital form, today we published the complete Buggy manual on our docs page. You can read through the manual to get a sense of what the board is capable of and what can you do with it. While we're on that note, let's see some interesting Buggy projects available online.
Teo from microcontroller-projects.com established himself as an authority on Buggy, after covering the two essential variations you'd use a wheeled development platform for. The first project is the obstacle avoiding robot, based on clicker 2 for PIC18FJ, a Proximity click, and a Bargraph click for visual feedback.
The motors turned out to be too quick for the measurement range of Proximity click, so Teo later improved the obstacle avoiding Buggy by putting an IR Distance click instead.
As for the line-follower Buggy, that project required more hardware hacking. A wooden bumper was added to the front of the vehicle to hang the sensors from.
But that is a light addition compared to the hard-core hardware hacking performed by students from the Technical Faculty in Novi Sad. You can look at their creations here. Unfortunately we don't have the source code for their projects.
In another interesting experiment featured in Robot Mag, Buggy was programmed with FlowStone – the Ruby-based drag and drop programming environment originally developed by DSPRobotics for FlowPaw. That's perhaps the easiest way to develop software for Buggy.
But the second best would be to use the simple Arduino IDE — now possible thanks to ChipKIT Core and its Androidization of PIC32 MCUs.
To enjoy the full capabilities of the Buggy and to make use of hundreds of pre-prepared libraries, we recommend mikroC, mikroBasic or mikroPascal.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika