My thoughts trash can – A blog about robotics, drones, electronics and other random amenities
In the last few day I reviewed the design of the top and incorporated a few devices in it: A BNO055 IMU and its USB/Serial;An uBlox GPS and its USB/Serial (I want to play with its doppler based velocity output that used to be of great help with drones);A ws28xx like 2W led lamp, to … Continue reading Sensors and multifunctional light for Slammer
During the last few weeks I wanted to take a break from coding and I moved to the "drawing board" (KiCad 🙂 ) to design a prototype board for the STM32 based uNav board. uNav is a motor controller board that integrates with ROS and was was initially based on PIC32. Some time ago I … Continue reading uNav2 Integrated Board prototype
This project started a few years ago as a learning platform for ROS and robotic in general. Slammer In its current configuration it uses four gearmotors for its locomotion using the UNAV32 prototype. Currently it handles feedback (encoders) on two motors only, the other two (identical) motors are simply wired in parallel. Not exactly optimal, … Continue reading Slammer
Introduction Some days ago I started this adventure with JetRacer.There were a few things that I didn't particularly like from the original design, mainly the fact that Jetson is powered from a USB powerbank (with the additional disadvantages of carrying a lot more weight, having to think about an additional battery and limiting the Jetson … Continue reading NVidia JetRacer
Update 1st may 2018: added a note to use realsense nodelet tag 1.8.1 and some patches to use ROS built from sources or GCC7. This post will guide you through the configuration of a Realsense R200 on Odroid XU4. There is nothing strictly related to this platform so they should apply to any armhf/x86 Ubuntu … Continue reading Setting up Realsense R200 on Odroid XU4 with ROS
Spending time with the guys at Officine Robotiche (a huge thank to Stefano Artigianato Robotico), i've discovered the world of line followers. Apparently simple robots whose ultimate goal is to, guess what, follow a line 🙂 This simple task involves several issues: reading sensors to determine the line displacement; employing a control algorithm to determine the movement vector; motor control; several … Continue reading “Padre Balistico” a (hopefully) fast line follower robot
If you know a little bit of OpenPilot history you understand it was more about when, not "if". After a little less than 4 years of contributions to the OpenPilot project it was time to part. Just to give a bit of context, I started with OP at the beginning of 2012, working at the early … Continue reading Introducing LibrePilot
It is now since several weeks that my Firepick has already started working as a 3D printer. There are some (expected) issues with calibration that i had not yet time to solve, this make a bit difficult to print large objects as the head does not move on a perfect flat plane but goes down … Continue reading FirePick now 3D printing
I'm shortly going to work integrating the OpenPilot telemetry with ROS. Main (long term) focus is indoor positioning and navigation. This is a quick mockup of the craft that will be used. Plates are going to be rebuilt to better host everything The reference platform  is made by OpenPilot Revolution flight controller; OpenPilot GPSV9 with … Continue reading Foldable quad for ROS integration experiments