Saturday, February 9, 2013

Observer Reboot [2.0]


Hi ! First of all I want to apologize for not being active for quiet some time. I was working on something big, but it was going slow so I had to make a break and I decided to reboot the observer !


Year ago I lost all of my data including code that was on observer, since that I'm storing all of my data on cloud, and a usb drive aswell. So when I was wondering what could I do with xbee modules, I thought that I could finally write some new code for observer, but at the same time I wanted to make some improvements. So I decided to use control glove, which has a lot of potential, even more now since I've added bend sensor to the index finger. So I've built small bracelet that has xbee inside and antenna. I etched new board for observer, which used a transistor to control whether servos are on or not, but that wasn't working quiet well because transistor wasn't able to provide enough current and to switch servos fast enough and it caused servos to jitter. Reason was that control glove sends data every 50 ms and observer refreshes itself every 45ms in order to make turning and speed control smooth enough. I am also using two power supplies now, because I like to separate logics from servos. It was quiet hard to synchronize data sending/receiving, and as you can see in the video it's far from being perfect.
 



This is the first time I've decided to make a proper narrated video, so please let me know what you think of it, because if it's bad I will return to the old way of doing short videos with music in background. So if you liked it please like it or let me now in the comments. As for my future plans, I'll get back to that big secret project and I hope, it won't take me lot of time to finish it.