Back To Robotics - A Long Awaited Update

-
There has been next to no progress on my robot; this has been due to buying a house and realizing I would need to do a lot of work on it. That aside; I now have a work bench coming together and the time and money freeing up to get back to it (yay!).

There is some news; there is now a local Maker Space getting started up. This may provide tools, resources and people to work with. I am very excited since I live nearby (about a mile away); though there is no way I could currently afford the membership fee. We will see; as I plan to stop by one of their open houses.

More exciting; I have purchased a part. I saw the part come up on my reader feed and realized it was cheap and would go quickly. I refer to the 1.8 inch 18 bit color TFT LCD display with microSD card breakout released by adafruit. At only $25.00 I knew they would be gone in an instant so I just went ahead and purchased one! My goal for this is to use it for output from the robot; debugging output in the short term and more interesting output in the long term. I'm not sure what to do with the SD card slot; but it is great to have it.

So; when I make progress on my robot, including adding the TFT as output in regards to what the robot is doing; then I will post with haste here! I do have a new idea for the line following so that it isn't so jerky, and I'm excited to try and implement it. For now; here are some pics of the screen as it arrived.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Resuming My Robot Work With Bonus 3D Printer Project

-
Image
Well after a long break of working on the house; this blog will be returning to a primarily robot programming focus. My work on the house is shared elsewhere... So; I've resumed work on my robot and added a second Arduino to my arsenal; this way I can prototype ideas without disassembling the robot. I have used it to go through the tutorial for the TFT screen: The new Arduino is an UNO; they come in much more sophisticated packaging than their predecessor: That is a sticker sheet on the right and a EULA in the middle. The first nice thing to notice about the UNO is it auto switches the power source. You can see this difference and other slight changes in the comparison here: So; I will post about the robot again when line following can be demonstrated and the code is ready to share. I hope to share two versions (with and without TFT info printing). With that; the other exciting news is that I am building a 3D printer; which I will document here and share my proble
Read more

Create a "GG Button" With an IOT Button on Discord

-
Image
I was having some fun with my internet button (found here: https://store.particle.io/collections/shields-and-kits), and also working on some bot coding. So I decided to bring the two together; with the goal of pressing a button to summon a bot to my channel to play a sound effect(s). This would be similar to the famous https://www.ggbutton.com/ button, but would play a sound to everyone I am in a Discord channel with. Since I was already working with Darkside's SoundBoard bot for Discord; I decided to utilize the API. That way I'd be creating a simple web hook that could later be used for other purposes; like having Jenkins run a build/deploy. You can see the completed work in action: This comes from this source code: 1: // This #include statement was automatically added by the Particle IDE. 2: #include <HttpClient.h> 3: 4: // This #include statement was automatically added by the Particle IDE. 5: #include <InternetButton.h> 6: 7: /
Read more

Fixing a dead Sansa MP3 player (Versions e200 e260 e280)

-
Image
First, here is the player we are discussing, or at least your average version: Although if you are here, you probably don't see the nice shiny interface above. That's a shame, but we'll try to fix it. This all started for me when a friend got a bag of crap from Woot! Among the loot, were quite a few dead Sansa e2XX players. You have to use the e200 tool to reflash them, it works better under Linux, and I run Linux (Ubuntu if you must know). So I ended up in a deal where I would try to fix all three. They were all fixed, and below I share how I eventually got all three working. There are many posts on the web about how to fix these. They involve going into factory mode and flashing the firmware. Unfortunately a measurable percentage of people find that to be completely useless because if you can't get the device into factory mode then you can't update the firmware. Let's troubleshoot a Sansa MP3 e2XX player. Keep following these steps, if you make it to t
Read more