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...

I added the code that shows the features enabled and shows the lights for active RC channels. After a number of program crashes, I narrowed down the rogue code and had it check for bad values and display error messages to the log about why it was encountering those values. After that it started working. I optimized the code a bit by replacing parts with more efficient code as I figured out some better ways to do things. After getting that working, I tried making some channels inactive and a bug in the PIC program was immediately apparent. This is exactly why I'm developing my Android interface...

[img android_interface1.jpg||left]It's been a little over a week since my last update, but I've been working on on my robot. I actually made a lot of progress just tonight. Over the past week and a half I've completed several important items including coming up with a basic layout, which turned out pretty much what I sketched out on paper. The code for returning requested data is now complete on the Arduino side. I'm working on getting the Android interface to update based on the returned values.

I currently have the switches changing to the correct values, with which the command is issues upo...

I ended up attaching an external LED, which worked great. After doing lots of reading and internet searching, I've finally come up with a solution that has everything working nicely. I found a very nice Android Library called usb-serial-for-android. This was written with the main purpose of communicating with the android. Additionally, this library includes drivers for communicating with many Arduino devices including FTDI based arduinos like my Diecimila, which will save me a lot of time. Although the documentation is sparse, I was able take the example program and intergrate it into my own p...