Assorted projects and pontifications.
Meet Bob, the goldfish (pictured below.) Bob is a pet at work, and we needed to keep him fed over the Thanksgiving break. I had an Arduino and a servo that were free, so I wanted to make something that would supply him with the right amount of food for the four days we would be gone. I came up with a little cylinder that I 3D-printed with a MakerBot…
This weekend I added a wireless Xbox controller to the list of devices I can use to control the Mecanumbot. Before now I’ve been able to use a standard RC transmitter, a computer keyboard, and a Wiimote. I again used the ROS framework to integrate the controller. Built into ROS is a joystick node to interface with the wireless USB dongle and I had already built a node to listen…
I built this little robot out of Lego this week (see picture.) The electronics include an Arduino, a Sparkfun xBee shield, and an Adafruit motor shield. On the other side of the xBee shield is a linux box running ROS. With ROS I can generated velocity messages from my keyboard or with a Wiimote. These messages get sent to the Arduino which translates the commands into individual motor speeds. I…
I had been noticing pretty poor Wifi performance with my Mecanumbot, especially when I’m trying to visualize data with rviz remotely. After a couple weeks of dealing slow performance and tethering the robot with an Ethernet cord, I finally decided to kick my Netgear WNR2000 v2 router to the curb and look for something new. I ended up with the Linksys E4200 after a quick search for “best Wifi router.”…
Today I transferred a lot of content to a new WordPress site (which you are reading now.) This is the fourth version of my website and marks the departure from the custom content management system I started in high school. There is still a lot more content to move, but hopefully this will be a much better website going forward since I can spend more time adding content and less…