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What did you do in your shop today?

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Robo Pi
(@robo-pi)
Robotics Engineer
Joined: 5 years ago
Posts: 1669
Topic starter  
Posted by: @casey

Sadly I find it never does.

Don't speak of harsh realities
bursting bubbles made of dreams
on the DroneBot Worshop Forums
we'll work together as helpful teams

No Nerf balls can prevent us
no tanks beyond our skill
together we can build it
with the force of our goodwill

Nothing can deter us
no project too immense
our collective wisdom conjured up
is overwhelmingly intense

So bring it on in dreams of gold
laced with silver linings
and if a problem should evolve
we'll solve it with our findings.

~~~ ? ? ? ? ? ~~~

DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James


   
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robotBuilder
(@robotbuilder)
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Posted by: @robo-pi
Posted by: @casey

Sadly I find it never does.

Don't speak of harsh realities
bursting bubbles made of dreams
...

You guys can dream all you like but I have to burst the bubble for myself!! It is my renewed interest to actually build a working robot before xmas and not just dream about it for yet another decade and that means facing some harsh realities of what I can do within a limited amount of time with my current skill levels.

What I have been doing in the workshop today is work on code to communicate between a pc that is doing "higher level processing" and the Arduino that is controlling the motors and reading sensory data. Later I will probably replace the pc with an RPi. The test base is in a 16x16 inch box. The electronics are very basic but will look a lot more complicated as I add the sensory inputs. The wireless keyboard is used to send the robot commands.

Yes I will still have the dreams but along side that I really hope I can focus on a doable project. Time will tell 🙂

theBase

 


   
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Robo Pi
(@robo-pi)
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Posts: 1669
Topic starter  
Posted by: @casey

Yes I will still have the dreams but along side that I really hope I can focus on a doable project.

I agree.  You definitely want to have realistic projects and expectations.  Especially if you're going to have time constraints on them.   By the way, never take my poems seriously.   I post them just for fun trying to keep them as upbeat and positive as possible.  Also, because they are poems I may often write lines that just fit the poetry, and aren't necessarily a reflection of any serious conversations.   And besides, I didn't mean to pick on your comment of reality.   I'm not going to deny the harsh truths of reality (except in poems) . ?

I too have dreams of building robots.   And I'm dealing with the reality of attempting to bring those dreams into reality.   What I've chosen to do is to simply build a lot of robots.   Some will have more capabilities than others.  All will be a learning process.  Some are dreams that are most likely quite unrealistic for a 70-year-old hobbyist to even be having.  But I not only dream, but also buy parts for the robots of my dreams. 

In fact, I ordered a bunch of stuff from AliExpress about a week ago and parts are starting to trickle in as we speak.   Yesterday I received a box of 200 2M plastic stand-offs and was finally able to secure my Raspberry Pies to some of my robots.  Although, I can see now that I should have ordered 3M standoffs.  A learning experience right there.

Today I received 20 teeny weeny SOP8 pcbs.  These are just little tiny boards that will allow me to solder 8 pin SMD chips onto these boards so I can connect wires to them.   It's going to be fun trying to solder these teeny weeny parts.  The actual chips should be coming any day now so I'll find out what it's like to solder these pretty soon.  These boards sure do look well-made.   So I'm quite happy about that.  I was going to go with the old-fashioned DIP packages, but these SMD components are quit a bit cheaper, especially when buying 20 at at time.  So I'm going to see if I can move over to using SMD components to try to save a bunch of money.

DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James


   
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Spyder
(@spyder)
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@casey

You've gotten further than I have

Maybe I've got too many parts...


   
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robotBuilder
(@robotbuilder)
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Posted by: @spyder

@casey

You've gotten further than I have

Maybe I've got too many parts...

My plan is to start with a simple robot base and work my way up.
The idea is to add circuits and components as you need them.

Bill's more complicated robot base and use of ROS is I presume to make it easier to add things later. However at this stage it would be a big expense and a steep learning curve for me so I am attempting a simpler start first.

In my current robot base the wireless keyboard and the current components are sufficient for remote control of the motors and sending commands to the Arduino to carry out various functions such as moveBaseForward(distance) or turnBaseLeft(degrees) or higher functions made out of these simpler functions such as doRectangle(width,height). That tests  how well the encoders can do dead reckoning. The robot should end up in the same position and orientation it started from. 

So what is the next stage and what circuits, hardware and code do I need to add?

I would say it is adding the sensory system.

Perhaps start with bumpers and code to decide what to do when the robot base hits something.

You also need an internal sensory system to do things like check the battery level to trigger the goal state  "find charger". Ultimately it is all about AI achieving goal states.

 


   
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soumitra
(@soumitra)
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Posts: 61
 

@robo-pi

Hii

Thanks ! See i have just started learing ROS few months ago

Am making a 4 wheel mecanum , 4 motor control with RPLidar and using Kinect Microsoft also for depth image to laserscan for SLAM navigation using without odonetry data hector slam process

Although gmapping i am not giving up as now encoders are in place for odometry.

Other sensor i will add to the base is ultrasonic for object sensibg at the chassis level for an emergency stop function only.

 

Raspberry pi 3 b with arduino mega2560 and cytron MDD10A Dual motor for base control

I can login from laptop ito pi to control robot navigation the map you see in the photo is not great on first attempt, so now would make a proper map by moving robot using teleop keyboard command from laptop to rpi3.

 

Thanks

 


   
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soumitra
(@soumitra)
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Posts: 61
 

@casey

Hi casey

Thanks. This is a 4 wheel 4 motor mecanum robot 

Using rplidarA1 and ms kinect xbox 360

Using the hector slam and also trying gmapping as now odometry is in place.

You use gmapping or hector slam to generate the map from lidar or kinct by moving robot aroud using laptop which ssh to the raspberry pi and then when map is complete ir SLAM You save the map in map server map saver and rerun the map ro navigate the robot

The map is a yaml file also a pgm file saved. 

The map occupancy is stored in binary form as 0 and 1, occupied are shows dark in map with is flagged.  


   
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Spyder
(@spyder)
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Posted by: @sdey76

using Kinect Microsoft also for depth image to laserscan

I use one of those to scan people to make mini statues. The detail isn't terrific, but, not bad if you're only making GI-Joe sized things. I also want to use it in my own bot, but, am concentrating on simply making the thing move right now (which I can actually do right now, but, not with ROS, which is the goal)


   
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Spyder
(@spyder)
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Posts: 846
 

I ordered a bunch of esp32's cuz I thought they might come in useful to replace the HC05 and HC06's because I hated the idea of playing with 3.3 vs 5v issue

While I was at it I found an ESP32CAM 

So, it's the same size (and price) as the ESP32, but with a camera, which is really cool, and I like cool things, so I ordered one

But when I opened the package, it didn't have a USB port to program it. Well, I thought I would be clever and chop the end off a USB cable and just plug the wires into the 5v and tx and rx

Which totally didn't work.

It probably would have, but the computer simply refused to recognize the new USB device. So I had to order the FTDI programmer. I'm going to play with that for a bit, then go back and play with the bot again until I run into yet another roadblock


   
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Recycled Roadkill
(@recycled-roadkill)
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The last part I've been waiting for for my Power Supply project finally arrived from China. Yay

Where did I leave the rest of the parts? Crap!

 

This message was approved by Recycled.Roadkill. May it find you in good health and humor.


   
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Robo Pi
(@robo-pi)
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Posts: 1669
Topic starter  
Posted by: @recycled-roadkill

Where did I leave the rest of the parts? Crap!

Tell me about it!  That's my life's story.  By the time the part comes in that I ordered I've lost the original thing I was working on. ? 

DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James


   
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codecage
(@codecage)
Member Admin
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Posts: 1018
 

What did I do?  Well for one thing I got the 5V and ground reversed hooking up my FTDI to TTL converter board, and while no smoke escapes, it no longer works!  Oops! ? 

I'll have to wait to see if I took out the ESP32-CAM as well.  Was setting up to get it loaded when I reversed the power leads. Since I never got anything loaded on the ESP32-CAM board I can't tell if it is toast or not.  At least it didn't smoke or smell like burnt toast.

Time to take a break!

SteveG


   
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Robo Pi
(@robo-pi)
Robotics Engineer
Joined: 5 years ago
Posts: 1669
Topic starter  

@codecage

Sorry to hear of the disaster.  I hate when that happens.  Such an easy thing to do.

I'm making up an order at AliExpress and was thinking of adding a lot of 50 level-shifter chips 74HC4050D.  These are $8.10 for 50 of them that's about 16 cents a piece.  These are SMD SOP16 chips.   I'm thinking about getting them now that you have me into KiCad. ?   It's all your fault. ? 

I'm designing a new Arduino shield board and I thought it might be nice to stick a few level-shifters on that shield just in case I need them.  In fact, I currently have an ESP8266-01 board on the shield too and I was using transistors to do the level shifting.   I could just use a couple channels off these level-shifters instead.

The 74HC4050D chips have 6 non-inverting gates to do the level shifting.  I'm not sure exactly how these work though.  I'm guessing you must have install pull-ups on each side to the voltages you want?

In any case, now that I'm getting into SMDs and possibly designing my own circuit boards I figure now is the time to start ordering common chips that I'll be using in my designs.   If these 74HC405D chips will work as level shifters then I'm sure I'll be using them all the time and so ordering 50 of them probably won't be a mistake.   I'll probably need to order some SMD pull-up resistors too then.

I never thought I'd get into working with SMD but here I go!

DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James


   
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Spyder
(@spyder)
Member
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Posts: 846
 

Everybody is gonna get those cameras working before I do


   
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Robo Pi
(@robo-pi)
Robotics Engineer
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Posts: 1669
Topic starter  

Today I did more work on my semantic speech project.  It's coming along very nicely.  I didn't like the semantics function of Microsoft Speech Platform so I wrote my own.  This is a good thing since I'm hoping to convert over to Python at a future date anyway, so the less dependent I am on the Microsoft Speech Platform the better.  Ironically I was actually attracted to their Speech Platform precisely because it has semantic capabilities.  But now I'm writing my own semantic routines anyway, so I won't need theirs after all.  Strange world.

DroneBot Workshop Robotics Engineer
James


   
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