Even more updates Posted at: Tue, Jun 29th, 2010 | 6:16PM UTC By Josh Ashby

A few items of update. First off, TI has launched a new product, the MSP430 Launchpad.

The Launchpad is a $4.30 with free shipping dev board for TI’s MSP430 chip family. On the board there is USB which supplies power, and acts as the debugging emulator and the programmer for the chip, and then a nice 20 pin DIP socket for the MSP430 chips. The board breaks out all of the pins for the chip, and also has a spot for an external crystal. After a very frustrating, and long cursing at TI’s servers spurt, which lasted a good day as the Launchpad was so popular I finally got around to placing my order, however the backorder for the Board looks like I will have it around the end of July, start of August sadly. Hopefully I can find, and build a dev environment for the MSP430 on linux, seeing as there is a GCC port for it already all that is left is integrating it with Code::Blocks, and finding a way to upload the code to the MSP430.

Other goodies that I have received include Read more…

Updates Posted at: Sun, Apr 25th, 2010 | 10:18AM UTC By Josh Ashby

Linux And Sci is once again due for it’s regular yearly updates, and this time it brings a new theme! Read more…

AVC ’10 Posted at: Sat, Apr 17th, 2010 | 6:48AM UTC By Josh Ashby

The Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Competition is TODAY! Read more…

New IRC channel Posted at: Tue, Apr 13th, 2010 | 6:42PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Linux And Sci is proud to announce: the Linux And Sci IRC channel! Read more…

BOB update Posted at: Wed, Mar 17th, 2010 | 4:55PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Half the time, something works, the other half of the time it doesn’t, and the other half of the time, it just goes up in smoke. As such was the case with my V1.5 Rev. 1 quad motor controller. Read more…

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.

Code Editors Posted at: Sun, Nov 22nd, 2009 | 7:23PM UTC By Josh Ashby

Quick update:
I’ve decided to start up development on my PyTe code editor. So far I’ve managed to get a new version made with PyQt4. This version includes tabbed editing, and a basic tabbed web browser.
As a result, I’d like to know what everyone liked in a code editor, feel free to let me know in the comments!
PyTe’s Code

Program, sleep, program, repeat Posted at: Sun, Nov 8th, 2009 | 9:31PM UTC By Josh Ashby

It’s been a while since I’ve had a big software challenge as most of my time of energy have been focused on BOB. Because of this, I’ve decided to make a CMS using Perl.

Thats right, the first useful thing I’m programming in Perl is yet another blogging and content management system. I decided to use Perl because it’s become the second best thing in the world, pulling in right behind Python, and because Irecently got this new web server (thanks to the parents and birthdays), I have a public place to show off my Perl. Also, Perl’s ease of use with MySQL databases, and it’s ability to handle text in a neat fashion makes it a good choice for this. Read more…