Hey all. I was really excited when my EZ-B arrived about a week ago. While it was on its way I was searching around for my first project. Thanks to DJ's great website and Ebay I found what I wanted. I picked up a RAD 2.0 for 15 bucks. It did not have any remote or battery charger (so what). And today I started on it! I hope to post my progress here and open to any ideas you all might have. As you can see I wasted no time before I opened it up!
The RAD 2.0 has what looks like a decent track base with motors and gear boxes (a bit loud when I tried out the motors). It has a physical gearbox selector switch for High and Low gearing (I will need to put a servo on that) which will be cool to mess with. The interesting thing about this guy is that he bends at the waist. He also has two arms that work together to grasp an object. It looks like can bend all the way over and pick up an object on the floor (we shall see). After opening it up I noticed it appears to be a decent thing to start modding.
I have an H bridge on the way for the track motors and I probably going to need another if I want to use the existing motors that control the waist and arm movements. I am thinking of putting in a accelerometer as well so when the bot goes up or down hills it could stabilize itself automatically! It will surely have a distance sensor...just not sure where to put it yet, camera, and probably go with an MP3 trigger. You may notice the circle on his chest...The original toy was remote control and could fire nerflike darts (pretty neat). Not sure I will keep that functionality as I am thinking of other cool gadgets to hook up to him. Tonight I tackled the head movement.....I will post more on that later.....
Kevin
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@kkeast - Brilliant! Thank you very much. That is really slick. I can see a definite use for Eventghost with ARC.
A have a small follow-up question. Eventghost has the ability to monitor a directory for a file, yes? If this is correct, can Eventghost read the contents of that file (assume a one-line command like "robot_forward") and then run a python 'macro' to control ARC as in your video?
Thanks again Kevin for sharing this information. It is much appreciated!
Thanx robotmaker;
Yeah, I forgot he put it on page 2:( This thread is getting long!:)lol
@JT, EventGhost does alot of cools stuff. I looked around and I do see the 'Directory Watcher' plugin but I have not used it. I enabled it and it looks like you point the 'Directory Watcher' to a folder and can see events being created when a file is created or modified. This can be used to trigger other events. I am not exactly sure what you want to do here but it sounds like you already have some application that creates the commands? If this could be a text file of a 'command'' you could easily launch a Python script to do what you need when Directory Watcher sees the change in the file.
The Python Script would need to open the file, look at it, and do a string comparison, and take action depending on what command was found. It looks like the elif (ElseIF) statement would work..and you could actually compare and send the EZ-B command in the same script.
Use the python client code above but try adding something like this:
file = open("sample.txt")
if file == "Move Forward": cli.send('Forward()\n') cli.close() elif file == "Say Hello": cli.send('Say(Hello There)\n') cli.close() elif file== "Scan Script": cli.send('ControlCommand(Scanning,scriptstart)\n') cli.close() . . . else: Print "Command Not Understood" #logs error in EventGhost log cli.close()
(The above code was not tested so you may have to play around with it)
Just curious as to what program you have creating the 'command file'? While the above should work, it seems a little clunky...but who knows...it might meet your needs.
I am not a Python code guru. I do work with it and also Visual Basic Script to do what I need. I am a huge code savager when it comes to things as there are so many examples out there and chances are half the time the code you want is already done and available for public use.
Good Luck...hope this helps...look forward to seeing if it works for you.
v/r
Kevin
@robotmaker - my thoughts exactly. I've been looking at trying the Leaf Project AI for some time, but I'm not much of a hardware guy to build the controller.
@kkeast - Thanks again for your assistance. Very much appreciated. And you're right, it is clunky... But it's my best idea at the moment.
I discovered that the Leaf Project AI is able to create a simple text file to be read by a chatbot (programD). So I figured if the Leaf Project AI could do that, it might be possible to write new code to have it write out another simple text file to send commands to ARC via the use of Eventghost. But this was my "clunky" connection between the two since the Leaf Project AI is written in LISP. However, it might also be possible to send commands directly to ARC from LISP via a socket similar to how you did using python/Eventghost. But I'm having trouble finding examples of how to do this in LISP. I'm still researching/formulating ideas...
@JT glad to help if i can.
@Robotmaker - LEAF proj looks very cool.....I will be looking into it as i carve are spare moments
v/r
kevin
@kkeast think that idea i have for arms will work
@kkeast - Thanks! You've been a big help already.
@robotmaker - you said, "just curious are you THOMAS on LEAF group club"
Sorry, I'm not Thomas. I did join the Leaf Project Y! Group recently though... I hadn't realized that a lot of the files I needed were located there and not the main Leaf Project Org site. eyeroll
@robotmaker , I need to look at those resistance sensors. I am also looking a the Hall Effect Sensor that sparkfun sells. I may try both to see how each works.
v/r
kevin