Well, I've been out of commission for a few days because of my back, but I've made some progress. I went through some tutorials for Eagle and now I'm working on my own board. I went ahead and designed standard connector wirings for each type of output. I based it on the standard RC 3 wire plug and went from there.

At this point, I'm running into a slight design issue, which is I²C running both 5v and 3.3v devices. Since the the 1 device I will definitely hook up runs at 3.3v, I'm partial to that, though I want to be able to hook up 5v devices in the future. 1 suggested solution on the internet...

[img full_sensors1.jpg||left]I've been working hard on a test board for the robot. I believe I have all of the sensors that I have received mounted on my bread board and everything fully wired together, except for the DIP switches. I hooked up most things with wire ties for temporary measure and they fit so well, I may just leave it that way or at least do something similar if I have to move them. I didn't attach the arduino or the breadboard, so they're currently just hanging there.

[img full_sensors2.jpg||right]I'm going to continue working on getting all of the required sensors in place, de...

So, I've been working on getting the sensors working on the arduino. I decided to start with my existing Accelerometer/Gyroscope chip (MPU-6050), since it is the predecessor to the MPU-9150 that I ordered a few days ago. I was able to get accurate readings off and even so far as to use the build in digital motion processor using sample code in the i2cdevlib library that can be downloaded here. As a bonus, this sensor also can sense temperature, which I'm pretty sure the one I ordered can do as well. Although I hooked up my magnetometer through its auxillary I²C connectors, I have yet to test i...

Happy New Year!

I assembled the arduino shield kit yesterday. Then I started taking inventory of all the sensors I have and all the ones I plan on getting. I ordered the SD Card board with the built in converter. I also purchased a MPU-9150 based Accelerometer/Gyroscope/Compass chip. I decided on this chip rather than a separate magnetometer and Accelerometer/gyroscope for a couple of reasons. First, it takes up less room on the board. Less room means more compact electronics. Second, for compass readings, it can automatically take tilt into account to get accurate compass readings.

At this po...

It's been a while. As a quick update, I ordered and received those additional parts, started a new job, and have moved across the country. Somebody at my work had done a presentation on RC stuff and I learned about some new stuff that was out there. It has been a few years since I originally looked up my information on Radio Control technology, so I did some more research and discovered something very important and a bit frustrating (in a good way). I found this article on Sparkfun that describes how to hook my RC receiver directly to my arduino and have access to all of the channels without t...

My parts arrived yesterday. I started cutting out some SIP connectors to connect the accelerometer, digital compass and directional IR sensor. The other IR sensors came with cables, so that was nice. Unfortunately, I ran a little short on connectors, but I was able to salvage a 4-pin connector from a computer speaker. I also found some ribbon cable that I'll use for these connectors. This means I need to add some pin headers for a 4-pin, 5-pin and 8-pin connector to the robot. That means I will probably have to remake my shield, which I thought I'd have to do anyhow so I can make use of additi...

According to package tracking, the sensors were just shipped yesterday. I'm still waiting for them to arrive. They're shipping overseas, so it may be another week or so.

I haven't had any updates for a couple of weeks because I haven't done anything more yet. I ended up ordering some sensors for my robot. I ordered 4 IR sensors, a directional IR sensor module, a 3-axis accelerometer and a (digital compass). I just got notice that those shipped out today, so hopefully they will be here in the next week or so. I'll continue to post when there are any updates.

For the most part, my program is fully operational now. I say for the most part because I still have a memory issue (probably a leak) that I need to hunt down. Looking at the stack trace, I suspect I may have overloaded the Debug Log TextView control. However, I now have it looping in a thread and updating the UI. I had to do a little function rewiting to make it so the communication didn't need to work as hard. I still have a few stability issues to fix. For instance, if the Android falls asleep while still connected, it needs to be rebooted. The program also seems to have trouble realizing i...

I now have the code that shows the channels times. This is mostly working. Occasionally, a channel time is never requested, so I'm working that out. Anyway, I made quite a few changes to the overall program based on certain problems.

First of all, I was running into the problem of the program occasionally crashing as I worked on new features and as a result, I couldn't look at my log tab. So, I created a function that records it to the system log and outputs it to the log tab at the same time. After that, I was able to see a lot more of what was going on.

When I received data back from the ard...