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HexAvoider Charisma RF Module

Recently, I had the pleasure of reviewing Microrobot's HexAvoider, an excellent robot with a variety of features that was both a joy to build and run. The HexAvoider has the ability to be augmented with an RF control unit, a Charisma board that utilizes two Radiometrix BiM2 RF modules.

The Board

The board is relatively simple to build, although the instructions seemed to differ somewhat from the kit I received. The board itself features several ICs and a few sockets, so be prepared to do a fair amount of fiddly soldering.

To the board's favour, it features no less than three different power methods: a 5V pin jack, a 9V standard 'headphone' jack and a 9V battery header and mounting space is also provided. What I did dislike about the board was the rather bizarre method of connecting to the controlling PC. The board has a four-pin jack that needs to be wired up to a specially created 9-pin serial socket, none of which is supplied. Thankfully, the kind people at Active Robots sent me the necessary components, but I felt that as specialized parts, they should have been included with the kit.

The robot part of the kit simply consisted of another Radiometrix module that slips into the jacks mounted either side of the main processor on the HexAvoider. On my robot, the module didn't sit quite flush against the jacks, but instead rested unevenly on the processor. While this didn't affect the performance of the module (as far as I could tell), it wasn't very neat nor sturdy.

The Software

The software also let the package down somewhat. The interface was easy to use:

But didn't cater for anything beyond the most basic requirements of a user. In their favour, the source was provided, so any user wanting to expand the system could do, but considering most users probably would want to, and not everyone has extensive Windows programming knowledge, a more fully-featured version would have been appreciated.

I also had a little trouble getting the system to work initially, and the documentation was absolutely bare minimum. No documentation covered troubleshooting, just one page stating the obvious about operating the GUI interface.

Overall, it just seemed that both the GUI interface and any documentation was quickly added as a afterthought.

Conclusion

Looking at the kit as a whole, you can be a little more forgiving - it does do what it says. The RF communication works nicely, and the robot responds well. It is also very simple to get up and running, simplying plugging the module in and making sure everything is working correctly. If you do have problems though, you cannot rely on the documentation to help whatsoever. Similarly, most users will probably want to spend some additional time coding a more complete GUI interface, or scripting system, for sending commands to the robot.

A fairly mediocre attempt but at a decent price that could be well-utilized by a resourceful programmer.

7.2

Price: £179.00 (HexAvoider + Charisma RF Module)

Liked: Power options, simple to set-up

Disliked: No documentation, over-simplified GUI interface, bad serial interface

Website: http://www.active-robots.com/

Submitted: 02/06/2004

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