Month

July 2017
25
Jul

Let’s Break It Down! “controlscript.php” Part 4

You’ve read all about Ryan’s “movement.py” script, so now it’s time to learn about “controlscript.php” – the script that collects client keystrokes and sends the movements to the WebSocket server. The script can be accessed at our GitHub repository here. So, let’s break it down! Firstly, “controlscript.php” is a misnomer. It should really say “controlscript.js”,...
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17
Jul

Sensor Party: The Hardware

We’ve recently been talking about the sensors we want to implement on the robot. We were interested in some sort of mapping or distance detection, so we first considered sonar sensors. However, as these are far too bulky for our small design, we settled on SHARP Infared sensors. Also added was an accelerometer and compass....
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13
Jul

Thingiverse

I uploaded all the robot’s design files and some renders I made of the mocked up internals in Sketchup. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2430783   In other news, the filament we ordered didn’t arrive (again), so we used some spare red ultimaker filament to print the lid, and we’re starting to put the components in the robot’s chassis.  It’s...
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12
Jul

Let’s Break It Down! “movement.py” part 3

Welcome to part 3 of Let’s break it down! ‘movement.py’. In the last post we went over two massive functions: ‘bckFwdRun(key, s)’ and ‘leftRightRun(key, s)’. In this post, we’re going to look at the next functions.  These two functions play a very important part in the communications between python and client SART Control Panel. Both...
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11
Jul

Let’s Break It Down! “movement.py” part 2

Today we’re back into breaking down the movement.py script. The last post walked through many of the functions needed to run the robot. Now we are going to break down some functions that create the movement. Without further ado, allons y! bckFwdRun(key, s) This function is what we call when we want the robot to go...
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10
Jul

Let’s Break It Down! “movement.py” part 1

In this post, I’m going to break down the “movement1v.py” script which, if you didn’t read the last post I wrote, can be accessed on our GitHub repository here. So, let’s break it down! The modules imported at the top can be attained from pip3 with these commands: Note: asyncio and websockets only work in python...
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09
Jul

Github 10/07/17

Today, I uploaded all of the SARTs code to our GitHub repository which you can find here. We have released our code under the GNU General Public License v3.0 so all of our code is ready and available to download, try out and improve! The “html” folder contains all the necessary web scripts and assets to...
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08
Jul

Motion in Motion

With the robot (or at least the internal components) now portable, we could run a number more interesting real-world tests. We know from Aaron’s two previous tests that we can run the robot for around 1.25 hours with everything hooked up and running, so today we decided to do yet another range test. This time,...
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07
Jul

Socket Stuff

Today we enter a new era of robotic communication! We’ve got the control panel and the robot talking directly with the robot using WebSockets. To do this, Ryan set up a WebSocket server on the robot using Python. The server waits for messages from the console. On my end, the client/control panel connects to the...
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05
Jul

Belt Stuff

Today I used one of the prototype chassis to measure the length of each belt.  I attached the servos and wheels, and then used string to find the exact length the belts needed to be. I cut the string and measured the length (or circumference, as the belts would be designed as a circle) and...
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