Commodity telepresence rover
Filed under: robots hacks
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Scott Metoyer built this awesome telepresence rover using really cheap parts. He started with a Pentium II laptop
that wasn’t being used. Then he picked up a relay board to connect to the parallel port. A servo board was connected to
the serial port and a webcam was attached to the USB port. The drive wheels are powered by two windshield wiper motors.
The rover runs a server application that talks to a wireless client computer for control. He says the control lag is
minimal and you get 15fps from the webcam with pan and tilt. This is a great start and really shows how cheaply you can
build a telepresence robot. Scott still has a lot of sensor connections he can use so I’m sure will see more
interesting applications in the future.

