Some test done over the weekend

I was rather busy this weekend and although I had my grandson with me I did not get into any robotics with him.  It wasn't until Columbus Day that I had a chance to work on the robot.  I did manage to test out some of the parts.  I removed the long arm on the robotic arm, leaving the base and elbow portions.  With that I had a total of three servos to try out the SSC-32 servo control from the Ubuntu Laptop.  I used the battery setup that I had made for the Pololu and connected it to the SSC-32 for power through two pins that I scavenged from an old modem printed circuit card.  By putting a serial terminal on the laptop and setting it up for 115K I was able to send serial commands to the SSC-32 to control each of the three servos.  That is when I realized that there was a bit more to changing the pulse width than I had thought.  The SSC-32 is capable of adding offsets to get the alignment of the servos correct.  Originally I had set the robotic arm up to have essentially 90 degree angles to deal with.  However, the weight of the long part of the arm caused the servos to dip by themselves.  Yesterday I had a package arrive from Lynxmotion which contained a set of gears to turn the claw plus or minus 90 degrees and some shorter aluminum tubes so that the moment arm would not be so great on the robotic arm.  I perhaps will have to invest in some stronger servos and different clamps in order to get the robotic arm to be more robust.  For right now, I just want to be able to play around with the concept.  I also was able to purchase another servo over the weekend to use with the webcam in order to form a pan/tilt unit.  I will work on the pan/tilt unit tonight.  My goal is to get some image processing up and running using the pan/tilt unit to move the webcam towards a specific colored object.  This is one of the experiments that I want to accomplish in preparation for the KIPR Open since I know that color will be a deciding factor.