Programming

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…

CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. In HTML, you use it to apply a certain look to specific elements in the page. CSS makes it easy to give every page on your website a unified appearance. The format is extremely straightforward, but to be effective you need to know how to specify which…

An SVG is a type of graphic that is defined by shapes and math instead of discrete pixels. So, it is scales nicely, but can’t make photo-realistic images. An (currently) SVG is two dimensional. That does not mean, though, that we cannot represent 3D information in this 2D space. After all, it is…

Programming is becoming more useful in a variety of fields. There are a lot of uses, but we are most interested in robotics applications. Microcontrollers like the Arduino are programmed in C++, which is undoubtedly the most widespread language. It is powerful, fast, and easier to use than some…

HTML is the language that your browser reads when it shows you a webpage. It is a variant of XML. It makes the actual content that you see, but also can contain visual styling information (typically in the form of an external CSS file) and also can have an in-browser (client-side) programming…

Sometimes it is necessary to turn character arrays into floats. However, precision can be an issue when using some of the current functions. The following function turns character arrays into a float that is split from the front half and the back half. This is one method for a more precise float.

There are times when a string is recieved, but rather than the entire string, just a piece of the string is desired. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a simple way to handle strings in C++. Therefore, I have devised a way to split a string based on comma separation.

Reading numbers from serial on an Arduino is needed surprisingly commonly. Exactly what is happening might be kind of hard to figure out.

Arduino has floats that are only accurate to about 6-7 digits. When combined with the fact that floats cannot represent certain decimal values well ( like .1 or .3 ) because they are expressed as negative powers of base 2, you may often see error - especially when full value is printed, or the…