My project is to create an interactive program using the Micro:bit microprocessor I'm building a game which uses a drill motor as a controller of sorts reading the rotation direction and speed as inputs for control
but my mentor also said it would be cool to power the board at the same time as the game is running so now I hit the situation where once I stop turning to change direction or my speed goes below transmitting 3.3 volts to power it then the game restarts and I lose all progress
I had the Idea of using a second micro:bit as a sort of storage place being powered by my computer and the two continuously communicating sending back player position and other objects on the LED's
but i can't figure out how to get the two Micro:bit's to talk to each other
If someone could just point me in the right direction or even set up some sort of communication to nudge me in the right direction as I start moving forward
i'm a high school student who doesn't know as much as I pretend to so I'll probably need a lot of help (i am more advanced then most in my class at this sort of thing so think of me as a tech gifted teenager thrown in with college students losing my undeserved ego day by day LOL) please help me somehow I'm currently completely lost
You won't be able to use Bluetooth for the reasons indicated in the documentation (not enough memory): http://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ble.html
However, there is an incoming implementation of the lighter radio module, which would allow you to send simple data: https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython/pull/283
The proposed documentation can be found in: https://github.com/bbcmicrobit/micropython/pull/305
As you can see in GitHub, at the time of writing it has not yet been merged into micropython. So if you'd like to try it you would have to clone the repository, apply the patch and build it from source. Keep in mind there is risk for the API to change, as there are still discussions about it.
Alternatively, as Sean has mentioned, you can use the C++ DAL implementation of the radio module to get something running on the meantime. Or if you prefer, the blocks and touch develop languages also offer radio functionality.
I don't think there is a way to do this in micropython (or at least simply), but the microbit runtime docs describe that, as well as supporting bluetooth, the 2.4 GHz radio:
However, it can also be placed into a much simpler mode of operation based that allows simple, direct micro:bit to micro:bit communication
In order to use this, you might need to write in c++ using the mbed environment (or offline) - but I hope this at least gives you a pointer to start from.
Here's a blog post describing how to do data logging using two microbits in exactly the configuration you describe.
http://www.suppertime.co.uk/blogmywiki/2016/06/microbit-logger
How to get the two micro:bits to talk to each other
As of 2016, you can! First check micropython has the radio module
import radio
If you get the error "No module named 'radio'", use https://codewith.mu/
Then follow the radio tutorial https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/radio.html
The API is
https://microbit-micropython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/radio.html
Related
I've currently developed a BLDC motor controller and it generally works fine. During some events however the microcontroller locks up (e.g. stopping the motor or fast changes of duty cycle). Because of this, I want to isolate the microcontroller from the power side (i.e. isolated supply and optocoupled signals) the issue however is I'm using sensorless control and am wondering what the best way of relaying the phase values back to the microcontroller would be?
I currently detect the zero crossing in software and use this to commutate my phases (as per the Microchip AN970 amongst others). I'd rather not use comparators on the power side and optocouplers to send back a digitized version of the phase voltages as I want to have the ability to change the trigger point.
I've looked at isolation amplifiers but they seem pretty expensive and I was wondering if there were any potentially cheaper solutions.
Thanks
Maybe have a look at this document:
https://www.silabs.com/documents/public/application-notes/AN614.pdf.
We use this design, but in a total different application. I dont' really know much about BLDC motors but maybe it helps.
kind regards
so basically I've been online trying to research this the whole day and I seem to only be able to come across specific setups that people have for their own specific needs rather than a generic list of hardware needed.
What I want to do firstly using my raspberry pi 2 running raspbian, and secondly a laptop running kali, is to be able to do penetration testing along with some extras.
What I Am looking for is a list of hardware that I need (other than the rpi2 for the first case and laptop for the second) that will enable me to sniff out WiFi signals, and attempt to get onto the network. I believe the general name for this is wardriving.
I know that I need a portable power supply for the rpi2, and a screen or some sort (I want a small screen that I can see the rpi gui desktop from. Not just terminal), so any suggestions of examples of those would be appreciated.
Where I get confused is about the WiFi antenna that I need. From what I understand is that it needs to be one that can monitor as well as connect to a WiFi, but I don't really know of any examples or of what the actual difference is between it and a normal usb WiFi stick.
I'm also not sure what else I need to have beyond that to successfully accomplish my stated goal.
Any further help would be greatly appreciated, and I think beneficial to anyone else who's looking to get started doing the same thing.
Any extra information would be good too what I mean is when I was doing my research I saw some people mentioning radio attachments, gps attachments, etc. But I'm not really sure if they're necessary to start or things that can be added further down the road with experience.
Thanks.
Ok so I seem to have found a good article that answers at least the general part of my question. It can be found here.
http://lewiscomputerhowto.blogspot.ca/2014/06/how-to-hack-wpawpa2-wi-fi-with-kali.html?m=1
It also gives tips on the process of pen testing.
BACKSTORY
The other day I found a motorized wheel chair that someone was throwing away. Being a maker who spends a lot of time looking at what other people have made online I decided to snatch it and try to make a robot out of it. I also bought an Arduino mega, a Kinect sensor, and a motor controller to try to control the motors and give it some form of vision.
MY VISION
Honestly I don’t intend for this robot to be much more than a fun, and challenging, project. My current goals are to have it run SLAM algorithms to figure out where it is on a map and for it to navigate to predetermined points on the map. However at this point I would be happy with just being able to do a simple teleop control with the keyboard.
MY PROBLEM
I have spent the past week researching ros and how to get it talking to my Arduino. I have installed diff_drive_controller, Turtlebot, ros_control, ros_serial, ros_arduino_bridge, and several others trying to find something that will tell the motors what to do. By now I feel like I have a good barely below the surface understanding about how ros works. Basically there are a series of nodes each publishing info for the other nodes to see and subscribing to info that they want to read. All I want right now is a node that publishes data about the velocity of the motors based on it trying to navigate or teleop or something like that. I think turtlebot is my best bet considering it is an all in one stack that does everything I want it to do. The only problem is I don’t have an iRobot create. But it seems like it should be simple enough to intercept those commands and have them drive my own robot base. However I’m not sure which topic to listen on and how to run turtle bot in a way that doesn’t try to connect to an iRobot create. I could just listen to the /cmd_vel_mux/input/teleop topic but I think that would limit me to just teleop and it might make it hard to move on to autonomy in the future.
What topic should I listen on? Am I going about this the right way? Are there any packages that would be better suited for my needs? Keep in mind that I am new to ros so tutorials would be appreciated.
I look forward to your responses
Thanks, Logan
Nice sounding project! I second the recommendation to take a look at the tutorials, but I think you spend some more time with the basic ROS tutorials before diving into the world of Arduino + ROS.
For instance, I noticed one misconception I believe you may have. It doesn't really matter which topic your nodes listens to, as its just a name that can be easily remapped through a parameter given when launching the node. The important thing is to ensure you are listening to the right type of messages - they specify the interface by which all the different nodes communicate. There's a bunch of options, and if none of them fit your use case, you can define your own.
I suspect that for low-level things, such as drivers for your motors, you will need to write your own ROS nodes. For advanced functionality, such as SLAM; there's a variety of options. You can find one that's suited to the input data you have available from your sensors.
One last recommendation is to take advantage of the features of ROS that allow you to break a big problem into manageable subtasks. Do one thing at a time - implement a motor contoroller, write a teleoperation method; taking care to specify suitable interfaces at each point. The advantage of this approach is that if you made smart choices in defining individual components with good interfaces, it is very easy to replace them with another one should you so wish.
You can find a list of tutorials how to interface Arduino and ROS here.
I've ripped open an old Pentium desktop. The main board is a Zida 5svx. I got to know from the manual (which i downloaded from the internet) the location of the ROM chip on the board, and took it out. It was mentioned in the manual that the chip was a Flash EEPROM.
Now, what I am interested in is this: Is there a way to erase the ROM and flash it with, say a C program to blink an LED (i know this might put you into a fit of laughter, but read on all the same), or control a motor?
I also want to know if I can construct a mega-sized micro-controller with the left-over Pentium, some MBs of RAM, and this ROM.
Any suggestions?
P.S: I know that such a uC will require appropriate power supply setup and things.
The key is in getting and deeply studying the manufacturer's datasheets for each device you remove and wish to reuse. I am supposing that since you asked the question that you did that you are not a professional electrical engineer - that's OK, but you will need to do hours, days, or weeks of study to truly understand the datasheets well enough to successfully reuse your motherboard chips because they are written for professional engineers with years of experience, and unfortunately they were not written to be understood by hobbyists. If you can succeed in acquiring and thoroughly understanding all of the datasheets (and the related user's guides as well for the more complex chips) then you have made it to the point where you might be able to start a custom design based on your recovered parts, on paper at least. In order to test your design and insure that each part of it is working will require at least an oscilloscope and volt meter - and the knowledge of how to use them. An understanding of basic electronics is essential, you will not succeed without it. Very good soldering/rework/assembly skills will be required as well if you hope to have your design truly work - you can do everything else right and it can still fail if your skills in this area are lacking. There is simply not enough time for me to advise you on everything you will need to know - but if you are motivated, dedicated, and you don't give up when setbacks and roadblocks occur (and trust me, they occur all too frequently for even the best engineers and best designs) - meaning that you are not easily frustrated when things don't work - then you have a chance at success. I wish you all the best, and try to have fun while doing it (important in case fun is all you ever get out of your project). :)
Besides Arduino, what other ways are there to learn hardware programming in a hands-on way? Are there any nifty kits available, either a pre-assembled robot, that you can program to move a certain way, or do certain things, or anything similar to that?
Atmel AVR and the PIC both have experiment boards that you can use solder stuff on to, usually they have a couple of buttons and some lights pre-soldered to the area. This let's you program/flash the microprocessor and play with the output pins. You can either write the programs in assembly or C.
Parallax have a number of kits. They have two product lines suited for "playing around", Basic Stamp and something called Propeller. The former is a small microprocessor that runs programs written in Basic (a tad disgusting ;)) and the latter runs something called Spin or assembly (well after compilation obviously.)
I would go with either AVR or the PIC. I've done PIC but I've heard good things about AVR, they seem to ship with better software.
At first look Microsoft's VPL sounds good, but when it comes to actually LEARNING how hardware works it goes a LONG way to hide those details from you. As a matter of fact it is pretty much designed for people who don't program, and is distastful to someone who's actually written embedded software. IF you just want to make stuff happen and not delve into the details it's fine, but if you want to get down to the metal like programming the "Arduino" boards it's not for you.
If you're used to something like the Arduino then something like the PIC will be an easy transistion. SparcFun Electronics has all sorts of DIY type projects and hardware available. If you have a decent bookstore around your area, I would suggest looking for "Circuit Cellar" magazine. It has articles on a monthly basis with project for someone looking to get into hardware projects, everything from homebrew Software Defined Radio to FPGA based 3D graphics. (Raytracing actually) Usually the authors describe the project in an article and "WHY" they made the decisions they did, a description and schematics of the hardware and provide a link to source code.
Cypress Semiconductor has one of the most interesting embedded processors on the market and several high quality dev boards for sale. The PSoC includes the ability to not only configure the software, but also to "drop in" software configured hardware such Analog to digital converters, serial I/O, Digital to Analog and Various amps and filters. It's a REALLY cool concept, and the "touch sensor" capability of the PSoC were actually used in several models of the IPod.
One thing about programming these little micros is they don't have a lot between you and the hardware, you get to see how things really work. It doesn't matter whether you're talking about an 8-bit microcontroller or a quad-core Pentium programming hardware is largely the same concept. You write to a memory mapped register for some piece of hardware like a serial controller, and the hardware responds in someway. If you program a baudrate generator in a PIC or PC it's largely the same idea, you write a value that will be used as a division factor from a given clock to achive a given baudrate. The numbers and names maybe different, but the concepts is the same. On a PC you may have to map to the PCI address of the card, which adds a some complications, but if you looked underneath the OS you would see that that was done just by writing values to registers simalar to programming a PIC to use a different "Page" of memory. Is it worth learning an 8-bitter? Well, there are approximately $5 billion dollars in sales of the little 8-bit micros today with projection only showing growth in that market in the future. I saw one reference that state the average car has 25 Microcontrollers in it. That's not too bad.
I haven't played with it much, but the iRobot looks pretty cool.
The ability to simulate how your robot will work which some of the other answers mentioned is nice, but there's nothing like seeing a real-life robot do what you programmed it to do. That, to me, is what really makes robots fun and cool.
There's the .NET Micro Framework.
It's incredibly simple to use/setup and there's lots of hardware being made to target this framework.
You should take a look at Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio which supports many different kits.
I have always been curious about gumstix. It seems more professional than arduino, and it aims at the Linux programmer. I cannot give you a real suggestion, as I've never played with it, but I would definitely go with one of this toys if I had to do and learn some cool hardware programming.