GUI madness Posted at: Sun, Dec 27th, 2009 | 11:46AM UTC By Josh Ashby

First off Linux And Sci would like to wish everyone a happy holiday season.

After having messed around with Open Frameworks for about 2 weeks now, I’ve come to a) like it, and b) want to remake BOBs control GUI with it. Because BOB has a modular build system, and can relay as much information to the computer as needed, making a GUI for him doesn’t always work out as being the easiest part of the project. PyQt tends to not want to play nice with Pygames joystick command from what I’ve messed around with it, and I would like to do the GUI in C or C++ with the under laying levels being Python and Perl as needed. This is because Python provides a nice, and in my personal opinion, easy to use serial module: Pyserial. Coding the main GUI in C means I refresh my past C days, and with the addition of Open Frameworks, things such as threads are easy to use, and the joystick can be handled by OpenGL which also can take care of graphics. Read more…

Arduino and Code::Blocks Posted at: Sun, Dec 20th, 2009 | 2:41PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Been under the weather the past few days, so it’s been all coding while laying in bed.

First off, I’ve started to mess around with the Open Frameworks and I must say, it is amazing from the little I’ve touched. I’ve managed to make a simple GUI that has 4 buttons laid out in a d-pad style from a game pad. when you click on any circle it will light up, and when the corresponding key on the keyboard (a,s,d,w) is pressed that circle with light up also. Finally, when the circles light up, they write a byte to the serial port. This will probably later on become the new GUI for BOB.

Source Here

Along with this, the newer Arduino IDE’s do not support (or like to even play nice with) my avr iscp so I’ve had to resort to using avrdude, which isn’t bad by it’s self, but having to manually set up the project folders and copy the libraries and all that is a pain. Because I like the Code::Blocks IDE (which is what the Linux version of Open Frameworks uses also) I decided to make a project template for using the Arduino libraries. After many errors:

I finally got help from Reggie on freenode/#sparkfun and was able to get a working project that used the Arduino libraries in Code::Blocks:

I have a github repository for any templates I make for Code::Blocks.

Happy Holidays!

Bytes of News Posted at: Wed, Dec 16th, 2009 | 2:14PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Because of finals at school this week, I have been slowed down in getting the terms of use for the site written and posted, sorry for the delay.

During my lunch periods I’ve started writing a technical paper on BOB, which goes into detail about his systems and build. You can see a preview of it here, Project: BOB.

I’m currently working on fixing the bug on BOB’s motor controllers that I found the other month. No matter what, the MOSFETs will not turn completely off, even when their gates are pulled low, and as a result as soon as BOB has power, his motors go crazy, to put it simply. I’ve stopped development on almost all of my projects right now because FIRST has started up again this year, and the Sparkfun AVC for 2010 is coming up in a few months which BOB has to be running for.  Between these two robots I don’t have much time for other projects and so as a result don’t expect to see any new code content on this blog for a few months.

Comments and spam Posted at: Wed, Dec 9th, 2009 | 1:30PM UTC By Josh Ashby

This is just a little side note, Linux And Sci will soon be getting a new page called Terms of Use. For those of you that think this is a little strict, the terms only apply to the comments and trackbacks to this site and the Forums. We have noticed that recently we have had a few comments appear, and these comments all are what we consider spam. Read more…