What did you do in your shop today?

Posted by: Pakabol

then i started building Ben Eaters 8 bit computer til i got to the programming of the EEPROM and found out i needed an arduino and once i got started with arduino i couldn't stop and i had to put the 8-bit computer on hold

Yes, I enjoyed watching Ben Eaters build his breadboard computer.   And that is a perfect project for someone who wants to understand how a computer works.  I was half-tempted to start building one too just for the pure FUN of it.   But then I realized that this would be silly.   I already know how the computer works so I wouldn't learn anything from building it.  I would just be doing it for fun.  But that's fun time I could be spending on building my robot which would be time far better spent to be sure.

But yeah, his little breadboard computer is cute. ? 

I guess it's the fact that we are all interested in these intricate computing machines that got us here in the first place.   I have a 1947 Chevy in the garage begging me to restore her.  I really should be doing that.  In the meantime, today I'm boring out a pulley for my tractor that I had just repaired with brazing.   Antique car restoration and building robots takes a back seat to my tractors!  I need my tractors.  Without them I would be in serious trouble.  I used them for everything from hauling my water to getting my firewood and making lumber.  I have a sawmill too.   I really don't have time for robots and antique cars at all.  But I tinker with them anyway.

Posted by: Pakabol

this is one is from a kit i got on ebay for practice soldering turn out nice (and it works) 🙂

That's a cute little kit to learn to solder on.   Nice project!

@Pakabol is that an STC 8051 controller on that kit board?

Thanks,

Scott

im quite the opposite. im not working right now as im staying with my dad and my step mom both aren't in good health both with copd on on O2 and we have his best friend from grade school living with us who has cancer and just had a kidney removed so i stay here and help out with the house and their needs witch gives me a lot of down time. so i figured ill make the best out of it and its amazing what you can learn off the internet. 

Posted by: jscottbee

@Pakabol is that an STC 8051 controller on that kit board?

Thanks,

Scott

yes it is, had to go look it up. 

anytime and thanks for the new info to look at 

Jon 

My shop is in Garland, TX. I'm lucky to have a 300 sq ft building in my back yard, insulated, sheetrocked, A/C and heat, .... That I'm using mostly for storage..

I do most of my work in my living room, Cable TV, internet, two 3D printers and almost all my electronic stuff About 90 sq ft. The wife puts up with it as long as I don't spill into her part of the living room.

I was actually able to correct some faulty arduino code that came from elegoo, only to discover that the H-Bridge provided with their 2.0 Robot kit has cooked? Well, not working right but apparently no smoke  got out.

So, my living room is my shop and my shop is storage.  I need help. 🙁

Posted by: Recycled Roadkill

So, my living room is my shop and my shop is storage.  I need help. 🙁

Your not alone.  I actually have 4 shops.  A welding and body shop, a sheet metal shop, a woodshop, and an antique car restoration shop.   Sounds great!  But these are actually just tiny sheds. ? 

So yeah, like you I end up doing most of my work in the living room.  No wife though.  I used to have two cats, but they apparently got fed up with me and died. 

OMG, how sad.

One of my bucket list items was "Restore a Car."

I chose a Chevy Corvair. Much fun but I sold it to get a 15 year old GoldWing.  What dangerous fun.

Okay, since I haven't been able to document it anywhere yet, I've just now realized that no programing is necessary to pair with an arduino bluetooth module. Just hook up power and TX RX pin and pair it with your phone.

One small step for Roadkill, one giant leap for, um..... me.  🙂

Of course programming is necessary to make use of the paired module. Hey, bit by bit I'm getting there.

Posted by: Recycled Roadkill

One of my bucket list items was "Restore a Car."

I chose a Chevy Corvair. Much fun but I sold it to get a 15 year old GoldWing.  What dangerous fun.

Whoa!  I can't believe what just happened!   When you mentioned a 15 year old GoldWing I was going to tell you that I have a 1982 Yamaha Virago out in one of my shops.  It's buried and hasn't been run for who knows how long, but I think it can be cleaned up and put back in service.

Anyway, here's what just happened,....   I decided to tell you how old my bike was so I used a calculator, yes I'm that lame.  This is 2019 right?   So I typed in 2019 and subtracted 1982 to figure out the age of the bike.  I got 37 years!!!     Did I do that right?   I can't believe that bike is 37 years old.  It must have been sitting in my garage longer than I thought.  I don't remember what year I bought it.  I did buy it used, but I do remember that it seemed like a fairly new bike at the time.  Now it's 37 years old.  That's hard to believe.

Although I'm 70 and I swear I was only about 50 last year.  ? 

I must have misplaced 20 years somewhere.   But even that would only bring the bike down to 17.  Even that seems older than I remember it being.   I think all these WiFi waves are making time pass by faster.

It is better to finish a project than to have lots of unfinished projects. 

I solved the encoder program problem.

In another language I use you do not have to include the brackets to a routine's name.

turnOffMotorA;

The Arduino C compiler did not complain so I didn't realise it was an issue. On a hunch I decided to add the brackets and the compiled program now works as intended!

turnOffMotorA();

Yeah, C likes it's parentheses and brackets. ? What other language are you using?

Posted by: casey

The Arduino C compiler did not complain so I didn't realise it was an issue. On a hunch I decided to add the brackets and the compiled program now works as intended!

turnOffMotorA();

That can be really hard to find when the Arduino IDE doesn't report the error.  Nice work discovering the problem!  Glad to hear that it's working now.

Posted by: casey

It is better to finish a project than to have lots of unfinished projects. 

I know,  my place is filled with unfinished projects.  But I can't seem to get out of this situation.

For example, I'm working on a farm tractor.  I basically had to remake the pulley on the front of the crankshaft.  This project has been taking me a week so far, and it's still not done yet.  I had to do some lathe work, then some brazing, then some more lathe work, and today I need to drill a hole in it that needs to be lined up just so.  The project seems to be taking forever.

But at the same time I have my truck up on jack stands.  It needs a new clutch.  I have the drive shaft off, but need to pull the transmission out next.  There are reasons why I needed to work on the tractor and truck at the same time.  One couldn't wait for the other to get done.   And yes, I have an antique car to restore too, but that's a hobby project.  The truck and tractor are unavoidable maintenance projects.  I also have about a dozen or so other maintenance projects going on all the time  Too numerous to list.

On my robot project, there are the "layers" like Bill is doing with DB1.  Only my layers are slightly different.   They would probably be best described as Base, Arms and Head.    So this then becomes 3 projects in one.  Each section requires a lot of design and work.  So I don't want to just work on one section at a time.  Instead I work on all three of them separately so that they can come together as a whole at the same time in the end.

So is the robot project one project or three?   In fact, we might even call it four projects, because I'm also writing a program on my notebook computer to control the robot during the prototyping stage.  I'll also use the notebook later to communicate with the robot.  In any case that program is a project in itself.

So my robot is basically four projects in one.   And each one of those four projects seem to keep giving birth to  new sub-projects within their specific area.

And then there's the real life on top of this.  I have a sawmill in the backyard and a pile of logs that need to be cut into lumber.   I'm actually falling behind in that project lately.

But yeah, it would be nice to only have one project.  I'm can't imagine what that would be like.  I don't think there was ever a time in my life when I only had one project to deal with.

Posted by: jscottbee

Yeah, C likes it's parentheses and brackets. ? What other language are you using?

 

 

https://www.freebasic.net/
It was the language I used in the robot base mentioned in my first post to grab images from webcams and interface via the K8055  board.
https://forum.dronebotworkshop.com/introductions/hi-2/
I had planned to develop a library of image processing routines much like Roborealm which didn't exist at the time but real life intervened and I was too busy to spend any time on building a working robot or develop a image processing library.
Before FreeBasic I was using the Bloodshed Dev-C++ IDE however I now use CodeBlocks whenever I do some C programming.
An example of a visual program I wrote years ago was a simple visual location of a target. The target had to be high contrast. First the program does a local threshold. It then looks for blobs (area of connected pixels) and returns their centroid coordinates and areas. From the resulting data it searches for two blobs with spatial arrangements and relative areas that best match the target. Below is an example of the program's output. Of course today you can do the same thing using Roborealm and of course any of the other more advanced libraries for making use of visual data.
Although FreeBasic can be used on the Raspberry PI I will probably just use Python to make use of all its libraries.

Posted by: Robo Pi

Posted by: casey

It is better to finish a project than to have lots of unfinished projects. 

I know,  my place is filled with unfinished projects.  But I can't seem to get out of this situation.

I guess it doesn't matter how many projects you have going as long as you are enjoying yourself. Work on the project you feel most interest in at the time. A robot is in a sense a never ending unfinished project starting with a simple foundation upon which you can add more and more functionality.