The speed controller is working well. It’s a simple PI controller but was easy to tune and handles the moderate slope of the road OK. The speed wasn’t very stable at 10 km/s as the motor and gearing doesn’t like going that low, but it was much better at 17.
I’ve hooked in the demands from the rover to the control board and added a simple PID based speed controller. The three position switch on the remote takes the car from manual control to auto with speed=0 to auto with speed=10 km/h.
I found a good container to house the electronics on my never-complete autopilot project. Here’s some pictures of it mounted onto the car: The car is a Conrad Rhino III buggy.
The supervisor for my autopilot is working. This is a fairly critical piece that runs on the AVR I/O board and handles the handover between the manual remote, the autopilot, and any safeties.
I’d like to learn Go, so I’m considering using for the command side of my never complete self driving RC truck project. Here’s some quick notes after a night of hacking:
We’ve got some Christmas stars in the window that needed some illumination. I hacked together a Olimex OLIMEXINO-85, a 8 mm RGB led, and the support components to make this:
I’m pretty happy with this. It’s a USB to 3.3 V 1 A supply using a AMS1117 linear regulator. I used the SMT version as the pin spacing is fine for veroboard and I can hide it away on the bottom of the board.
Looks like I’ve run into my first problem: FTDI based USB to serial adapters don’t work as they seem to be automatically disconnected shortly after plug in. I suspect that it’s udev running the brltty rules, not finding a assistive device, and aborting.
Looks like I’ve run into my first problem: FTDI based USB to serial adapters don’t work on Chrome OS as they seem to be automatically disconnected shortly after plug in. I suspect that it’s udev running the brltty rules, not finding a assistive device, and aborting.
I’m going to see if my Samsung ARM Chromebook can be my primary machine. I’ve put a crouton Ubuntu chroot on a SD card (so it survives the kids dropping out of developer mode) and will mainly SSH into it.