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 the year I had the remote configured so that the Teensy that was monitoring the switches and joysticks was creating messages and sending them directly to the robot via ROS (Robot Operating System).  This was great as it removes a step on the Pi but means that you need to hard code the controller for each thing you want to control.

Instead what I’ve done is use one of the features of the Teensy which is to present to the computer as a joystick.  What this means is that I can have code on the Pi that will read the events from the “joystick” and translate it into whatever commands are needed.

It’s not quite as elegant but is far more versatile for sure as I can deploy the joystick code in a ROS package.  There’s a dodgy connection on a couple of the switches so I need to sort out the wiring and add in a rotary encoder.

This was the original plan for the joysticks so I’m going full circle, soon MacFeegle Prime will ride again!