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- Suspended Bicore -
Note: All of the circuits on this page are for Personal use only. Commercial usage is prohibited unless arrangements are made with the patent holder Mark W. Tilden mwtilden@lanl.gov.
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The bicore is the basis of advanced BEAM! Most intermediate to advanced BEAM robots are built off of the bicore. Uses go all the way from photovores to servo motor drivers to walkers to.... You get the idea. What it is is basically just an oscillator who's outputs go (+ - , - +, + -, - +....) and the rate of oscillations is controlled by the resister (R1). Another cool thing is that they can be grouped together to form large complex structures. Really a very cool circuit once you figure out how it works. As I noted above it has a very wide range of uses. Photovores, light seeking heads, walkers, servo motor drivers.... Just to name a few. The walker category is HUGE!! There's walkers with 2 motors to 12 motors. No sensors to electronic compasses and sonar. A single bicore can't do much other than blink a couple LEDs or make a motor go back (which is sometimes what you might want) but they are most useful in groups.
Same as above but with inverters ganged up for current on the outputs Pins facing down (top of chip)


Note that you can fit up to 4 bicore's on a single 240 chip.
Description
Quantity
Where to get
Part #
R1 (see circuit notes) 1 Digikey See circuit notes
.22uF Capacitor 2 Digikey P4966-ND
74AC240 1 Digikey 74AC240PC-ND
R1 R1 controls the rate of oscillation. If you want quick oscillations you use a low value resister, long oscillations you use large value resister. I normally don't use values below 100K or over 10M, 1.6M is a common value. The size of the resistor is totally application specific so there is no set value. Coming soon.... Yep, check it out.

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Nervous nets copyright and patented by Mark Tilden. Content originally developed by Ian Bernstein.