relay on SWiK

Linux Robot, more hardware ideas

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:21:21 -0700

http://www.adamsinfo.com/linux-robot-more-hardware-ideas/

Follow on from: http://www.adamsinfo.com/linux-robot-watch-this-space/

I’ve been giving the layout and hardware of the device some thought. Hardware should be split up as follows:

Main board At minimum, CPU, IO pin out, RAM, CF/SD, and USB controller. Wifi and/or ethernet would be nice. It will need to be linux friendly of course.

Custom IO board Connect to Main board via 16 bit bus. The custom IO board will have some logic gate chips and maybe some memory. It will then connect child boards for LEDs, the ultrasonic sensors, switches and relays. The relays will then be connected to the wheels. I’ll consider adding other sensors for temperature, light, etc.

[ FILL IN INFO: I’m currently struggling to find a set of eyes for the device. It could contain some kind of laser scanner underneath which it can scan over the ground as it moves, trying to find something better and define a purpose for the eyes]

Each of the 4 wheels need to be at least 3 speed but 4 or 5 would be better.

[ FILL IN INFO: I need research and some good ideas on protocol and flow for the main board and custom IO board to communicate]

The wheels would ideally be ‘balls’ such as from mice. Need to research if this is practical/doable. For the battery, ideally it would be at least 6v and preferably 12 for the motors however this needs to be USB friendly and as such I’m considering a 4.2-4.7v Li-ION battery that will last a good few hours at full 350mA draw. Minimum might be around 180mA from initial research, but I may need more.

If I do need more which I’m considering a reasonable possibility, I might be able to step up 5v/60mA from the USB port to 12v/25mA and trickle charge an 11.2v battery. I don’t like the idea much though and the heavier the battery, the more power the device will end up using having to haul it around all day.

The radio at first was going to be an FM based setup. The USB base would contain a FM oscillator transmitter and the device would contain a receiver. It would use this receiver to locate the base station. I’m thinking that this is going to become a limitation and so I’m open to better ways of the devices maintaining simple communication.

The system will present all hardware inputs and outputs as available to software, including battery level.

All settings and fine tunes will be available on the device as variable resistors and can be hand tweaked. Ideally and in future, this would be software[automatic] controlled.

Short of a pair of wings or some kind of weapon, I think that’s about all the hardware we’ll need. I’m going to make sure that the IO card is mapped out in a way that allows for even more expansion. I will want to add an FM transmitter/receiver, some kind of sound device, possibly an LCD and definitely a camera and mic.

Thanks to Reader Phil, although I was looking at the beagleboard originally I’m thinking that this: Proposed Board

Proposed Board

http://foxlx.acmesystems.it/?id=4

I’m sure that there’s more hardware out there but I’m having a hard time tracking it down.

The board isn’t available for order until the 13th October [08] so unless I can find anything more suitable, I’ll plan on working with this one.

At this point if anyone is interested in contribute any expertise or assistance, any extra help would be appreciated!

If anyone has any thoughts on this to now, please share in the forums

I’m going to keep researching boards but plan on using this one for the moment. I then need to start looking at the IO board and components.

Linux Robot - Watch this space

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 02:01:10 -0700

http://www.adamsinfo.com/linux-robot-watch-this-space/#more-206

I’ve been struggling to think of a good project to start on. I’m currently writing the APNIC Box series here, and I’m on part 4 of maybe 7 or 8 right now. I like to keep at least one personal project of interest on the go at a time so back to struggling for inspiration.. Feel free to tell me that this is an awful idea and suggest something else, but until I hear otherwise I’m going to roll with it.

Linux Robot – Requirements

Here’s what I’m thinking. Small embedded device, way smaller than the Mikrotik 532a used for the APNIC Box. The board will need USB [as we’re going to use the 5v for charging later]. I’d like to start with a powerful enough board that it can be expanded later with relative ease.

The device will initially have few inputs and outputs. It will support miniPCI, USB, Serial Console, CF card, GPIO or some other good method for controlling a relay board and some motors. The device will have 4 small wheels, maybe rubber [old mouse] balls instead and some ultrasonic sensors, 4, 6 or 8.

The hardware will be flexible enough for really powerful software control. The OS running on the device will of course be Linux, and will have the ‘robot software’ loaded onto the CF card. The device will accept USB ‘programs’ to be uploaded and downloaded. These programs will have full access to the sensors, wheel relays, LEDs, battery information, etc.

I’d like to power the device by a reasonably small and light 4.2v? battery, it will accept charge from a 5v USB source.

The USB source will be mounted in some kind of housing that the device can very easily and clumsily fit in to. Both the USB source device/charger and the robot itself will contain a radio [definitely 802.11g later], but for now a simple FM oscillator would probably be good. The software will also have access to this radio. The device will maintain contact with it’s base station. IR won’t be any good here as the device needs some kind of a range. I’ll need to assess the practicality of range vs hardware.

The key initial wow factor will be the fact that the device upon reaching a certain battery charge threshold will seek out and return to its base for automatic charging.

The device will need some kind of cache – it’s last 100 actions where an ‘action’ might be 100msec of wheel movement. Should the device lose its base station, it should attempt to start reversing those actions until it reaches the base station. It will also require some basic common sense as to roughly how it got to wherever it’s sitting so it can reverse on it to locate the base station rather than aimlessly getting lost.

One of the important aims of the device is that it’s capabilities are only realistically limited by the software instructions we upload to it, and not it’s hardware.

I would like the hardware to at minimum be capable of expanding to more advanced hardware, such as the wifi mentioned above, maybe an IR transmitter, etc, etc. As we all know once the hardware is set up and we have a solid OS on board, the possibilities are endless.

I’ve found a few similar projects out there:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9103 http://www.neonbox.org/linuxbot/linuxbot.html http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/May2001/article205.shtml

These projects look great but don’t really seem to address what I want to build here. I’d really be interested to know of any similar project or resources already out there.

I’ve scattered some initial ideas down here and would really welcome for some feedback on this. The first step is going to be to lay out some more solid ideas and milestones and then start sourcing a board. I’m also going to have to build schematics and hardware prototype boards for portions of it and interfaces between the various child boards in side.

Excited, Adam

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Testa se o relay esta aberto

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Setting up Postfix to relay through GMail in Gentoo - [darryl.cain.com.au]

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RBL.JP

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stick stack

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Postfix Gmail SMTP Relay " Hone Watson Bookmarks

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G2C Tech Consultoria Ltda.

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Re: [FUG-BR] Relay access denied - postfix

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How to get Postfix to bounce mails off of Gmail.

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Postfix setup howto on Ubuntu.

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SourceForge.net: TCP Relay IPv6

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Windows TCP Relay. This application is a TCP bouncer from ipv* to ipv* (ipv4/ipv6 - ipv4/ipv4 - ipv6/ipv4 - ipv6/ipv6) for Windows NT/2000 and Windows Xp

Postfix Gmail SMTP Relay " Hone Watson Bookmarks

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Setting up Postfix to relay through GMail in Gentoo - [darryl.cain.com.au]

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