My plans for projects...

Ravenkallen · 2011-03-31 12:46

Sorry i have been so distant lately. My job has been a bummer(They got me working in three departments). I am still working on beta testing the Prop stick- like board for WBA and i will be embedding the first one of them on a new robot(Instead of the PDA, which is on hold for now).

I am working on a few projects right now and i can share some details if anybody cares:)

1: Finish beta testing the boards from WBA consulting and do a small write about them(I really like them so far)

2: Work on my new robot. I bought one of these from Sparkfun and i am going to be sticking a Propeller on it soon
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10336

3: I am working on a OS-like program for the C3. It will be able to launch games and other apps(Like a notepad program, calender and stuff like that). I am also working on a programming language to, But that is still in the planning stage

4: And lastly i am working on a DIY laser tag system. It will utilize low power red lasers and an array of LDR's or photocells for the vest. The beam divergence of the laser is big enough to allow a smaller detection system.

HollyMinkowski · 2011-03-31 14:08

The laser tag project sound like fun.
I am totally unfamiliar with the details of laser tag though.
Do they modulate the laser so that things like time, what gun
fired the laser, user name..etc get recorded by the receiver
on the vest? If not it would seem possible to do that with a Uc.

iDave · 2011-03-31 14:31

Nice selection of a platform to build a prop bot off of. I've had my eye on that myself! Tell us what u think of it. Good luck

Ravenkallen · 2011-03-31 14:38

@Holly... Uh, they might do that with the nicer systems, but mine will be pretty basic. I don't think they modulate the light wave to carry information, but i could be wrong. I think the vest has a microcontroller that registers every "hit" and if it reaches a certain amount it will mean that you lost. I bought a few cheap laser card modules, that should work very well with my project. I was inspired by that target practice project in the May 2011 issue of Nuts and Volts.

Duane Degn · 2011-04-01 15:39

I also purchased a Rover 5 from SparkFun. I also went for their Mecanum wheels (which cost more than the robot base). I figure $60 isn't a bad price for four motors with each one having an encoder.

I wish the Mecanum wheels were easier to take on off because I also like the original tread on the robot.

I want this robot to have some sort of machine vision. I'm trying to get Hanno's video capture/filter method to work with it. (I'm almost finished wiring it up the ADC he suggests.)

I had originally planed to use a RC receiver to control the robot when it's not in autonomous mode but I'm afraid it would use up too many pins. My current plan is to use a Nordic nRF24L01+ module to send commands to the robot. With the Nordic module I also have the robot send information back to me.

Sorry to go on so long. I interpreted the "..." in your thread title to be "and what are yours?"

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2011-04-01 15:49

@Ravenkallen

I too am buried in projects and deadlines, but I'd love to collaborate with you on the C3 project. It's been on my list too.

OBC

Hanno · 2011-04-02 16:45

Duane-
How's your project coming, are you at "first light"? I'm always interested in what people are doing with computer vision.
Hanno

Ravenkallen · 2011-04-02 20:35

@Daune... No problem. You can tell about your project here:) I have interfaced a battery to the robot(so far) just for speed tests and with 7.2 it seems pretty fast. I wish it was a little faster, but i guess you can't have high torque and speed together. I heard someone say that you can use PWM to safely make it run faster? Your video project sounds interesting. I can't wait until that kind of tech filters down to the hobbyist's hands.

@OBC... Yeah, that would be cool. I could tell you some details of my plan if you would like:)

@Idave... It seems to be a very solid platform so far. One thing that concerns me is the tension that the tread puts on the motors. I adjusted mine so the tread was not on as tight.

Dr_Acula · 2011-04-02 22:39

: And lastly i am working on a DIY laser tag system. It will utilize low power red lasers and an array of LDR's or photocells for the vest. The beam divergence of the laser is big enough to allow a smaller detection system.

and Holly

The laser tag project sound like fun.
I am totally unfamiliar with the details of laser tag though.
Do they modulate the laser so that things like time, what gun
fired the laser, user name..etc get recorded by the receiver
on the vest? If not it would seem possible to do that with a Uc.

That sounds a fun project. I played laser tag against the kids yesterday at a new laser skirmish that has just opened nearby.

I think there are two parts - the laser is just a standard pointer laser but it does not convey any information. The shooting part is actually done with infrared leds and IR photodetectors, and these do convey information in the modulation.

So in a way, this might be even easier to do with the propeller as you just use the standard 38khz modulation.

The laser beam is very precise, but the IR beam spreads out at about 15 degrees, so you don't have to be so accurate to get a hit. Better to get in an early shot that is roughly in the right direction than try to line up the perfect shot and get shot yourself in the process. This is where age and guile can beat youth and fleetness of foot...

Oldbitcollector (Jeff) · 2011-04-03 11:38

Ravenkallen wrote: »

@OBC... Yeah, that would be cool. I could tell you some details of my plan if you would like:)

There are many applications which could be ported to the C3 pretty easily. It's only a matter of someone sitting down to do it, which I haven't had a chance to work on myself. (at least largely)

What are your thoughts here?

OBC

Duane Degn · 2011-04-03 12:12

@Ravenkallen, Thanks for letting tag along on your thread. I decided to start a blog and a thread in the Projects forum.

@Hanno, Thanks for your interest. I'm not sure if I'm at "first light." It depends on how it's defined. As I mention in the new project thread I've sent the output of the ADC to the terminal. It appears to be working. It didn't work with ViewPort the way you describe it in the book. I'm not sure if I'm using ViewPort correctly and I haven't taken the time to learn how to use it. (I've decided I'm not in the mood to learn a program right now.) I think I understand PASM enough to modify your code to use it the way I want to. I'd welcome any comments or suggestions you may have. I think it would be good to use the project thread to discuss it though. I don't want to abuse Ravenkallen's thread anymore than I already have.

Ravenkallen · 2011-04-05 11:01

@OBC... Well, i have begun to write a OS like program for the C3. It is not really an operating system in the truest since of the word, but rather a program launcher that has a nice human interface. I call it PASos(Propeller App System) and i am better than half way from finishing it. The hardest part may be the actual program loader, but i think i have an idea for it. Basically, once you find the program you want to run the Propeller will load the first 32kilobytes of EEPROM with the program info and the top 32Kilobytes with PASos program. It will then reboot loading the first 32 Kilobytes into the Prop RAM, THEN the actual program will have a small piece of code at the beginning that will put the PASos program back onto the lower 32kilobytes. I have yet to test it, but i think it should work and hopefully it will not be to slow. There are some problems with this idea, like if the power was cycled during the program loading or if the reset button was pushed.
But yeah, i think if we could team up on this we could get a cool system rolling and maybe even win over a few new Propeller heads.

Duane Degn · 2011-04-05 13:29

Ravenkallen,

Have you tried out Kyedos? It might be an easy way to do what you want.

Would your PASos write to the EEPROM every time it loaded a program? I don't think you want a programming writing to the EEPROM more than a couple of times a day.

Does PASos use a SD card? If so, then you ought to check out Kyedos.

BTW, I posted some notes about the Rover 5 motors on my project thread. They might interest you since you have the same robot base.

Duane

Ravenkallen · 2011-04-05 19:45

@Duane... The Kyedos may be better, but i have never used it before. It also uses up a lot of program space, i think. Newer EEPROMS have a write endurance of about 1 million cycles. Even if you wrote to it ten times a day, the EEPROM would last 100,000 days, which would be like 273 years:).. I will have to check out the post about your robot. It sounds interesting.

Ravenkallen · 2011-05-11 06:39

Well here is a video of the Propeller Powered Rover 5 platform... It there are some details in the comments, but you all can ask me if you want to know anything else... Sorry i has taken so long for me to do some of this stuff. I have had a really stressful week(Girls are so freaking confusing:().... I was thinking about naming my robot after her, but i might not now...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POA1TP34fPA

Dr_Acula · 2011-05-11 07:23

@Duane... The Kyedos may be better, but i have never used it before. It also uses up a lot of program space, i think.

Kyedos enables you to run other programs. This means it does not matter how much space kyedos itself takes (it almost fills the hub ram) because you then put things into other programs.

Kye speeded up the reboot process a lot recently. There are a couple of command line programs for kyedos, eg "TYPE" which dumps a text file on the sd card to the screen. It takes about a second to load up the new program, and of course the screen goes blank for this time as the video drivers are being reloaded.

I've also written XMODEM and this is now used in the catalina IDE. For writing pure cog code that can be loaded, I hit a button on the IDE and this then goes off and sends a command to kyedos to run xmodem, then downloads the cog binary to the sd card, then reboots kyedos. Much quicker than using the proptool and pulling the sd card in and out all the time.

Kyedos is so useful I now have it permanently programmed into the eeprom. If I want to debug, I program to ram, and if I want a permanent program, I save it to the sd card and this means the eeprom never gets written to any more.

You never need run out of memory as you can write programs that chain each other (and pass data via cogs or via the sd card).

There you go, that was the easy bit.

Now the complicated stuff:

Girls are so freaking confusing

Hmm. *ponders*. Nope. Can't help you there at all...

Mike Green · 2011-05-11 07:42

On PASos:
As others have said, you really don't want to be copying programs around in EEPROM. It takes a long time, even using page mode and the EEPROM wears out faster than you think. There are a variety of loaders for EEPROM that load up a cog with an EEPROM loader and that loader just reads the EEPROM (no wear and pretty fast) to load the program into hub RAM just like the Prop's built-in ROM loader does. The loaders can load directly from 32K segments of EEPROM other than the first and some can load from EEPROMs on other I/O pins than 28/29. The loader in FemtoBasic is written this way (sdspiFemto.spin) and loads from an SD card the same way.

Ravenkallen · 2011-05-11 07:45

@Dr_acula... Huh, that kyedos does actually sound like it might work for my intended purpose... It's just that i wanted a custom interface for the GUI part of loading programs. Would you mind if i gutted the program and just took the loader out? Or maybe i don't really understand what it is.... As girls go, i really like her, but she just told me yesterday that she is "seeing" somebody else, Some guy she only met a little while ago even though i was going out with her first... Sorry everybody for talking about my love life on the forums:)

Ravenkallen · 2011-05-11 07:52

@Mike.... You guys are probably right. I wasn't using the method i was using because it made the most sense, but because it was the only concept i could wrap my head around... I still don't really get how a traditional loader works. I assume that there is some PASM that runs in the cogs that reads 32 kilobytes(from the SD card) and puts it into the main RAM? Then i guess the system runs it somehow?

Mike Green · 2011-05-11 08:17

Look at the source code for sdspiFemto (you really ought to look at other people's code ... you'll learn "the good", "the bad", and "the ugly" of coding). There's a Spin method for loading from an EEPROM and a Spin method for loading from an SD card file. In both cases, they start up a PASM routine in a cog that reads in the 16 byte program header and gets the actual program size from that, then reads in the program. There's a common routine that clears the rest of RAM to zero, sets up the Spin stack, then starts up a Spin interpreter using the information just loaded.

Duane Degn · 2011-05-11 08:39

I doubt Dr_Acula would mind if you "gutted" his program. As he's stated many times, his program is based a lot on what Kye has done.

I've already gutted Dr_Acula's program for my own use. That's the way it works. Someone modifies a program done by someone else which is then modified by another person. Each person sharing their own version making everyone's life easier. I try to make sure and share any object I've written that I think will be useful to others. Any code I haven't posted is available for the asking (though I doubt it is in a useful state).

Girls have to torment you now, so you appreciate your wife when you finally meet her.

WBA Consulting · 2011-05-11 08:42

Here's a link to a thread for my EEPROM Key Bootloader experience that boots the prop from a secondary EEPROM with A0 pulled high when present. As seen there, Mike was very helpful with getting it working correctly. (thanks again Mike) I am hoping to have the final touches on my Thermistor Tester completed today so that it can be utilizing this code and EEPROM Key.

Dr_Acula · 2011-05-11 16:50

@Dr_acula... Huh, that kyedos does actually sound like it might work for my intended purpose... It's just that i wanted a custom interface for the GUI part of loading programs. Would you mind if i gutted the program and just took the loader out? Or maybe i don't really understand what it is.... As girls go, i really like her, but she just told me yesterday that she is "seeing" somebody else, Some guy she only met a little while ago even though i was going out with her first... Sorry everybody for talking about my love life on the forums

Sure, pull it all to bits. I'd like to see a better front end for it anyway - icons that you click rather than commands that you type. What might work quite well is to write a pure icon driven GUI program and it will have a mouse and graphics driver, and it works out which icon the user clicked. Save that value somewhere (in a cog), then reboot into the guts of Kyedos which then runs that program. When the program is finished, reboot back to the icon display program.

That would actually be a cool demo for the prop.

As for the second bit

but she just told me yesterday that she is "seeing" somebody else

Oh darn. Actually, that happened to me with my first girlfriend - my parents thought I was spending too much time on electronics so they sent me off for a week's work experience in an electronics factory to show me how the real world of electronics worked. One week without attention and my girlfriend was "seeing someone else". Long term outcome is I'm still playing around with electronics (sorry, parents!) and I have a wife who doesn't mind (exactly like Duane says - Girls have to torment you now, so you appreciate your wife when you finally meet her. ).

Jorge P · 2011-05-12 05:16

Ravenkallen wrote: »

4: And lastly i am working on a DIY laser tag system. It will utilize low power red lasers and an array of LDR's or photocells for the vest. The beam divergence of the laser is big enough to allow a smaller detection system.

For this project, make a safe call by requiring that the laser gun can only be fired with both hands on the gun, I have seen many teeth get knocked out in Laser-Tron untill they took this saftey step. If you get a chance to visit Hooksett, NH, go play a few games http://www.spacecenter.com/ordereze/Content/3/Summary.aspx. Systems like that run roughly $200,000 to buy so if you can make something decent they will have a new compettor.

Ravenkallen · 2011-05-12 08:07

@Dr_acula... Thanks:) I will have to get around to looking at it... I was also looking at Mike's loader program which might work to.... So, i just told the girl how i felt about the whole thing and she said she never had any feelings for me AND she didn't think i had any for her(Even though i went on a date with her, got to know her family/ friends). She said that her and the other guy just "clicked"(They probably clicked alright, if you get me:))... So we are just friends and that gives my time to wallow in all my apparent inadequacies as a man!....BUT, as i have heard them say, "there are many fish in the sea" and i sure as heck know that i could find one that has better taste in music:)... Hey, man. Thanks for listening. It means a lot. You to Duane!

@Jorge P... I have heard about the laser tag in Hooksett, and it would be really cool to go to sometime... I don't think mine will ever compete with a professional set. Mine is not going to be as aesthetically pleasing either:)... $200,000!!!! Wow, no wonder they told us not to drop them:)

@WBA... I am looking into that loader that Nick posted on that thread.. Thanks for the link!

Ravenkallen · 2011-05-17 08:11

Well, i thought i would post a little update... I looked over the bootloader code on the thread that Nick linked to and i thought i would give it a shot.. Sure enough after a little adjusting to get it to work on the C3, i had up and running. I was so excited and it was definitely the high light of the week. So i am working on my new C3 OS at full steam ahead!!!! I was wondering if someone could design a cool, full color logo that would be displayed at the beginning of the power up? It would be best if it was in its own self contained program, as there will not be a lot of room left in the main program. Whoever will help with this, will receive a large mention in the credits section:)... I will start a separate thread soon.

My plans for projects...

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