The BeagleBone Black is a very powerful and affordable microcontroller - superior to an Arduino Uno in a lot of ways. It’s fast enough to be used as a desktop computer, yet it has more pinouts than an Uno. With the BeagleBone Black priced at $45, it’s really a great value compared to an Arduino…
Who hasn’t wanted to monitor what goes on when they aren’t there. When I was little, I was always curious about whether or not anyone was going into my room and would have loved a camera monitoring system. It may even be a good idea to have a simple security setup for an apartment.
These parts are designed to be used in a quadrocopter. They are sold as replacement parts to pre-built quadrocopters, but work well as interchangable parts. This is documention on the specs and how to use the parts, since none is really provided.
To use Python as a graphical interface for an Arduino powered robot, programmatically read the USB with the pySerial library. However, waiting for input from pySerial’s Serial object is blocking, which means that it will prevent your GUI from being responsive. The process cannot update buttons…
An IMU is something used to detect primarily orientation, but is a general term for an Inertial Measurement Unit. Needless to say, they can provide some vital information for mobile robots. In particular, flying robots need them since there is no way to guess orientation using wheel encoders.
I want to make a divergence meter. A divergence meter is not a real thing. It’s a fictional device from Steins;Gate to tell if the worldline (timeline) has changed substantially from an original world line (the alpha) - following the time travel theory popularized by John Titor. If you’ve never…
I could not really find any great Blender models of the Arduino Uno on the internet, so I decided to make my own. Mine was made entirely from scratch and does not use any image textures (except the wood in this demo). It features most of the details of the Uno, but does not have the printed circuitry. It was modelled off an image and some eyeballing for sizes, so it may not necessarily be to scale, but it looks close enough for Blender work. Even the text is there, using the default Blender font. The Arduino logo is actually a mesh of a circle. The most notable chips have the proper text on them, and the plugs even are shaped like sockets.
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is used because a microcontroller cannot easily send a specific voltages. It really can only turn a switch on and off. To be able to send a ratio of the current voltage, something like a variable resistor would need to be digitally controlled, but we don’t have that.…
A PD controller can be used in a real-time on a robot where a goal value can be both measured and controlled. A PD control is robust, which means that it can overcome unexpected behavior.
JavaScript is an actual programming language that is interpreted and run by your browser. It makes a webpage interactive and dynamic instead of just a rigid page that doesn’t change once it’s loaded. You can use it to send and recieve bits of information without having to load another page. It…
