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Going Pro! Er, More Pro…

I’ll admit I’ve not made as much progress here as I’d like, part time wasn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. So, I’ve taken the very scary step and I’m going full time! Notice handed in today, let’s see how far down this rabbit hole goes! 😀

Power Up!

The first job for a few of the scavenged batteries is the Roomba, the existing battery finally gave up the ghost and rather than replacing it again and having to use the slow charger it came with I thought I’d upgrade. The original battery pack has a 2Ah (amp-hour) capacity, the three scavenged batteries in […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]