Sunday 19 August 2018

Robot 2 - The Platform

So I have received a new platform to build my robot on and I have recorded a short video showing the contents.

This platform is only plastic but being transparent makes it easier to see through to what you are doing. I’ve used one of these before and the only downside is the plastic isn’t that strong and can break with rough handling.

Here is the video.


Next video will show some assembly as I start to work out what else I need to build this. 

Wednesday 15 August 2018

Robot 1 Service Discovery

Robot 1 - Service Discovery

Contrary to popular belief, a robot does not have to have human form to be considered a robot

I am starting a new project to build an autonomous vehicle of sorts but small scale. The aim is to challenge myself with many problems across multiple domains and to build something that in the end is to a degree autonomous.

I plan on building this around a Raspberry Pi 2 along with a cheap robot platform purchased form eBay.

My language of choice for the software will be python as that is well supported on the Pi.

To be transparent, I have actually attempted this before but now I'm going to go back and redo and document / video the whole process so others can benefit from my learning.

So the first problem that I know I will encounter based on past experience is how to log into my Pi over the network. I have a wireless USB card so it can join the network but it obviously gets a new address each time it starts.

I know there are many service discovery protocols out there so I plan on using one of those to get the Pi to announce itself.

I've found the following project on GitHub which looks like the ticket:

https://github.com/ZeWaren/python-upnp-ssdp-example

I'll work on writing some python based on this.

I'll also create a project in GitHub so I can share my code with people should they be interested.

Ryan