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A Bumper Update

Officially on holiday for two weeks! Next up on the robot, after getting the wheel encoders working, are the bumper triggers.  These are essentially the same as the wheel encoders so I can reuse the circuit I put  together and they’ll be on interrupt pins too.  Thankfully the Arduino Mega I upgraded too has another […]

NE-Thing Joysticks

I’ve a few projects in the planning so thought I’d go back to basics and do some work on my NE-Thing controller.  All code for this one so not much to see, the code is a bit hacky at the minute too so not sharing that yet out of sheer embarrassment… For PiWars earlier in […]

NE-Thing Joysticks

I’ve a few projects in the planning so thought I’d go back to basics and do some work on my NE-Thing controller.  All code for this one so not much to see, the code is a bit hacky at the minute too so not sharing that yet out of sheer embarrassment… For PiWars earlier in […]

Salvaging Batteries

Things have slowed down this week as I’ve had to go full time to help on a project at work, I’ve two weeks off from Monday though which I’m very much looking forward to! In the mean time I’m working through a box of laptop batteries I bought on ebay. They’re great to scavenge batteries […]

NE-Thing – Robot Controller

I’ve been working on the robot controller over the past few days, mostly on the software, but added a snazzy new wallpaper too. I’ve been trying to get ROS Noetic installed on it without any luck, I tried a few different distributions and hit different errors each time.  The penny finally dropped when I tried […]

Fabrication Station, Done! Ish…

It’s done! Ish… I need to mount the PSU for both printers outside of their enclosures, they are pretty big parts that need printing but that’s what Chonk is for after all.   In order to make both fit I’ve removed the Multimaterial Unit from my Prusa, I need to give it time to figure […]

Welp, There’s The Problem!

Yesterday I mentioned I was working to get the encoders working so we can measure the speed the wheels are turning at, I also mentioned I could get the encoders working but not at the same time as the motors.  You’d think that’d be a clue but apparently not! A bit of background. I’m using […]

Encoder Teardown

I’ve been working on getting the wheel encoders working today and I’ve got a circuit that works. It turned out that it uses a photodiode rather than a light dependant resistor. An LDR changes resistance depending on how much light hits it, they’re often used in night light sensors and in phones to dim the […]

Occupancy Sensor, vManyLots

Work has continued on the occupancy sensor to help with social distancing, I switched from Arduino’s connected using NRF24L01 modules to ESP32s that have a built in Wifi chip.  The former was an unpredictable pain in the backside and the latter just seem to work! I was due to install these on Saturday but ended […]

New Logo/Branding Preview

Work is continuing on the Roomba, I’m hoping to have a video for that this weekend, but I thought I’d share the new logo for the company.   The existing and previous logos have been thrown together based on doodles but I’m getting help with these.  The bot lacks a name at the minute, it’ll come […]