Sunday, October 23, 2005

Rise from the dead!

Since its near Halloween I guess it is appropriate to resurrect this blog. Its has been totally dead because all I have been working on is my RoboMagellen robot and its supposed to be a secret. But as the guy who most wants it to be secret is not really adding much to the robot. In fact only Paul, Tom and I have really done anything directly towards the bot, I feel I can go ahead and post here while I wait for my battery to re-charge.

My time is soooo limited its sick. My progress has be horrifyingly slow. I literally steal time to work on the bot.

Anyway, I have some code now that should drive my bot toward a GPS way point. I think I have finally mastered the Linux serial port scheme. It took a while to get it right though. Once the battery re-charges I'm going to take the bot outside and give it a go.

Right now I'm seem to have a custom carrier PCB for my GPS that works despite the need to cut it up all to hell and back because I got the connector backwards. The motor serial code is finally seems to stably command the motor controller. The worst problem is the the very first command after power up always seems to error out. Easy enough to send an initial stop command. I also have Paul's 933Mhz SBC running Puppy Linux and interfaced to the custom PCB that level shifts for the GPS and motor controllers. The code compiles. It has undergone some testing. It really should work.

Wish me luck!

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