Took the G-Bot outside for the first time with him fully built up... Nerve racking to say the least...
The bad new: He ended up off the driveway in a ditch tipping JUUUUSSSST shy of going over... wheww... The control is a bit unnatural due to the lag and the way the ramping seems to continue for a time after input stops. Add to that my driveway is uneven and mildly inclined plus, my notebook seemed to be working hard. There seemed to be a com delay too.
Note to self: Do not wear flip flops while experimenting with a 300 lb robot and NEVER get the front of one under a tread...
Note to self two: Get a wireless game controller and NEVER let the cord of the current one get under a tread... Very bad...
It was much better when I got him into our street which is level. One of my neighbors drove by and stopped next to him. The G-Bot escorted him down the street for a short bit... very cool.
The good news: He DIDN'T go over and my and my neighbors had some great fun!
I'll be doing some more tweaking and practice runs today. That should be fun and hopefully we'll figure out enough to get a few Trick or Treaters going on Halloween.
ONLY POSSIBLE BECAUSE OF EZ ROBOT! AWESOME!
More video next week...
:D
Other robots from Synthiam community
Bhouston's Inmoov's Touch Sensors
Jstarne1's 2013 Robo Ducki , Gift To Dj & The Ez Robot...
Oh my gosh! You are going to have all the attention for Halloween.
That is so awesome! He's really huge isn't he. I'd be scared of him toppling over too. But he made it!
Very nice, glad you got that big guy moving. So entertaining to watch !
I just updated the project on the cloud to include a ScriptStop ControlCommand in the Movement Panel direction scripts. I don't know how much (if any) difference it will make but the way it was before there wasn't anything saying "OK stop that running" before asking it to run again. If nothing else it's now written properly
Give it a whirl (if you merged the project with yours before and kept the script manager's name as I set it just remove your movement panel, merge with this new version and import the new Movement Panel - make sure you keep a copy of your project before doing it though, I'd hate for it to screw up the project and have no back up).
If you are experiencing lag with the new version (and probably the old version too) it is more likely to be the sabertooth and the speed ramping causing it, in which case there's not a lot that can be done. It should work without lag (at least in my tests without a sabertooth it updates everything near instantly), the only thing to watch out for should be the fact that stop doesn't immediately stop but ramps down so it may take half a second or so to come to a halt.
Touching on the safety features (i.e. anti-child run over, crashing, tipping etc) you could add in Ultrasonic sensors (@Toymaker has a good set up for these) and script it to monitor the distance to something, if it (rapidly) gets too close it shuts off the movement, similar to how these new cars work to make it impossible to have a low speed crash.
Wow Sweet Robot, great work
And Gwen brings us another episode of "lost in Gwen world"... lol
Great job, thanks for sharing...
j
I have a couple of the ultrasonic sensors that I bought with the EZ Robot kits. They'll definitely be in the next round of upgrades...
@Rich Thanks again so much for updating the code. I wont be able to try it out until the morning though.
I'll let you know how it works out
Gwen, Is your lag problem due to the need to use a script to simulate ramping? What version of the Sabertooth are you using? I was under the impression that the Sabertooth is able to ramp. I've never used the Sabertooth alone (without a Kangaroo attached for position and speed) but I've seen the setting in the DEScribe software. You need to attach your laptop to the sabertooth through a TTL / USB adaptor and run the DEscribe software. However I'm not sure ramping is available in all versions. I'm going to have to look it over.
Not really sure Dave. I'm in way over my head with microcontrollers and motor controllers of any sort. All I really know is it ramped and mixed perfectly and smoothly when I had it connected to 2 channels on my Futaba RC unit. That is PWM though right? But I trhought that was analog? I did experiment with using PWM controls in ARC but there was no simple way to use PWM with a joystick without writing custom script... I think. Don't even know if it would work the same. I would imagine its possible to do.
No idea though... BUT always interested in future improvements
confused
G