Blogs

Well first of all Hi everyone, although i've been visiting the site for a while this is my first post on LMR so here goes.

After seeing patrickmccabe's "Fundamentals of a GPS guided vehicle" tutorial i decided to give it a go. I got the code supplied in the tutorial to work without any trouble but when i started making some changes and adding to the code i ran into a few problems.

2.9.2010, past midnight

Lots of Ideas have been flying trough my mind since I got the motor driver ready.

(http://letsmakerobots.com/node/22363)

I am now thinking of making something like this, only a bit bigger.

This design involves having the wheels on each side connected to each other, so that they work almost as treads.

I've been asked by a few people from different places if there is a simple way to use an Arduino to build robots. I explained there are ready made boards like Roboduino, Romeo, Motoruino, etc. that can be used. Or a custom compatible board. I told them that I went both ways, mostly because Roboduino doesn't have an H-bridge onboard, so I designed my own customizable board, R-Dev-Ino. Usually people are puzzled with all that information, as they have heard about Arduino, some have used it in art projects or so, but did not hear about the other variants. Seems complicated...

So I am in the Arduino water and have started to swim. I found a cheap off-brand Wii Nunchuk controller, made a PCB adapter for the plug and have it playing nice with my Duemilanove. I have also taken all the numbers coming from the nunchuk and converted them all to nice clean 0-255 ints. From there, I coded a serial receive loop so the whole unit could be used as a stand-alone plug-in to other devices. Basically, the chip just sits there and waits for a single character followed by a CR. I.e.

Good news and Bad news............

Bad news :- is one of my Xbees "Kicked the Bucket".

I had been using the same setup all week and on a simple power-up its power Led blipped then remained off...........

Anyway i have to renew it - so for the moment i am "Grounded" - "Locked Down" .... Shift Happens......

While waiting for my parts I used my free time to learn Google SketchUp (just realised it sounds like Ketchup).
It is really REALLY easy!!!

Now that i got my new battery(8.4v 1000mah, down below), my bluetooth receiver for my "controller" died. Now i have to get another one.

I caught up with Steve (jazzed on the Parallax Forums) last weekend in person - he has been working on porting linux to the Propeller.  Sounded a bit ambitious to me, but he has been working with Heater and they already have Zylin's ZPU processing core up and running on the Propeller - uclinux can be compiled for ZPU - the only thing missing is memory.

Jazzed has been working on that, too - he showed me a prototype he's been working on that expands the Propeller Platform with  32MB of sdram -

       This is my first blog over here. first let me brief my self. I am an electronics and communications student 3rd year studying in india. Ok I just wanted to ask some of the like minded people here about some ideas and suggestions for an electronics symposium that I am going to attend.Here is a link to the site

http://www.drestein.in/

I would like some ideas on what to do for some of the events hosted there. comment even if the Ideas you've thought of are heck crazy!

Broadcasting Live from Cape Cod, Mass.

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Non Stream Link Motor Test 1 Depronmotortest1.wmv

Non Stream Link Rudder / Elevator installation & Motor Test  2 Depron Rudder/Elevator servos

Installation of Rudder and Elevator Servos..... and

Test of Motor Mount for Depron , not full power yet - as no multimeter was in circuit (max 10A before burnout ;-)

Custom Depron Vice.............

Horray.

Today i just received two packets in the mail. In one of these was an lcd which i bought for less than 5$ incl. shipping, while in the other was a 434 mhz rf link kit, which cost around 8$. So far i haven't tested either, as i received them moments ago. I will soon be using them though, proabably to make a custom arduino rf controller, i only need a second arudino..

 <== picture right here

Here i present my Arduino XBee Serial Multiple Servo Solution

Here is a Sketch of the system (apparently sketching your ideas is the thing todo...........)

I thought i was home and dry with my Depron1, Depron2 project untill i found out that mixing serial data and servos (ie >2 servos) with the Arduino environment is just not possible (due to the complexity of the multiple interrupts).

Intro

I decided to make a mini sumo robot a few weeks ago instead of doing an obstacle avoider. Turns out that once you think about it, mini sumo bots and obstacle avoiders are pretty much the same! The only changes I would need to make would be to the code. Great! Sumos can also double as line followers. So in short, they're pretty versatile. Here is an image of most of the parts that will go into this sucker. 

Picture

Project "Depron" took one leap forward , with the successful implementation of the XBee Pros and Servo mechanisms.

This is a key part of the project, which means that i can now rest easy that i have 1.5Kms of control over the plane.

It was no easy task to find compatible libraries for the Serial & Servo control,

In the end a combo of the NewSoftSerial.h and ServoTimer1.h was the perfect match for the XBee Pros, the whole system is running rock steady @ 38400Baud (@momo).

My current project is a start here robot with .NET Micro Framework using a FEZ Domino board from GHI Electronics. The FEZ Domino is pin compatible to Arduino, but has more processing power (ARM7 core with 72MHz clock), 3 UART, 2SPI USB host and micro SD-Card support.

After building some Arduino based robots I think it's time for a change. Before I start build the robot itself some testings were needed to find out if the FEZ Domino is a worthy successor for the Arduino and can I use my existing Arduino shields.

Hey guys,

Gareth and I were talking planes and UAV's the other day so I posted a quick video for him to watch showing one of my planes and why I thought it would be a good choice for a UAV. He suggested I post it for all, so I am.

The plane in the video is a Sky Surfer from Banana Hobby. Now, I personally hate Banana Hobby, but I must admit that this is one great deal on a plane... $160 gets you the plane, TX, charger, a brushless and an extra battery. The Sky Surfer is a rip-off of a Easystar which has been around for years.

so, im designing/ building a uav. today i should be ordering parts. it will avoid obstacles, land itself on walls when the battery's too low, run ino walls to land, and be able to push itself off walls. it will not use a microcontroller originally, but ill add one over time, along with other fun things. heres my cad-

Hey guys,

Just a simple question: Do any of you guys have a suggestion for a free chunk of software to rip a dvd to divx or mp4? Mp4 would be great! I just don't want to have to go through 1000 free downloads that just turn out to be spyware and adware. I am on a PC, by the way.  --Thanks for any suggestions.

--I should add that I need it to have an unlocker as well.

I am a 55 year old computer programmer with 35 years experience as a systems programmer. During that time, I have programmed in over 40 languages professionally.

In the Air Force, I was a ICBM mechanic as a civilian, I started out as an electronics engineer but was so distracted by the idea of programming that I took it up full time. Consequently, I have been able to strattle the fence, one foot in software, the other in hardware. Nowhere has this been more beneficial than in the robotics world.

I was looking around the instructables site for a fun project a while back and came across the SERB (SErvo RoBot) by oomlout. I thought it had a nice design, so I read through the instructable and noticed a comment on how difficult it would be to cut out the pieces on a scroll saw. I've noticed that most folks just have the pieces laser cut for them, but since I'm always looking for a good challenge, I decided to give it a try by hand. I downloaded the pattern, glued it to a piece of plexiglass I had laying around the garage and went for it.

Doug Dingus (potatohead in the Parallax forums) has written an article about retro game development using the Propeller - he interviewed me and Jim Bagley and did a great job summarizing the Prop.  We also kicked in 5 El Jugadors to give away to readers.  Classic VGM has made a special preview version of the article here;

Hi everybody,

Just registered here after browsing the site for a while. I've read a few electronics courses at university and done some basic soldering, but mostly I'm a newbie. I'm from Sweden, 25 years old, and started programming in QuickBASIC when I was 13, and moved along most of the popular languages.

After a long absence from flying gliders and control-line aeroplanes, i have decided to take to the air again, with the experience/inspiration and ideas from LMR - i think i have enough guts to start right from scratch.

Yes you guessed it ........ this is not an "Off the Shelf" model, this will be a complete self build from solid floor to fluffy cloud.....

Yup, found it at a garage sale for 3 bucks! --Nice little upgrade from my $7 radio shack iron!

Just a quick update on what I've been working on. I am building a virtual control panel with Processing and the controlP5 libraries. The video is pretty self-explainatory, and understand what you are seeing is a work in progress as is the code attached. If you go through the code, you will quickly see a lot of stand-in values and lables that still need to be gone through, but never the less, the "system" is rock-solid. I think that's it...

Word to ya motha'

Whatup gays,

Calculon just wanted to drop a line and share his progess on his B5 (the Backyard Beverage Buddy BBot) project. He started his project last fall as his entry into the XMOS challenge. The idea is basically a cooler on wheels that rolls around Caluclon's backyard and offers beverages to people. That's still the general plan, but the scope has changed slightly.

B5 1.0 features the following: