Author Archive
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Silvestre getting ready for 2012
After some months resting, Silvestre’s got back to work this past weekend and the first thing we’ve done is to enhance the communication protocol in order to get even more data in real time on the PC. This data is essential to study software, hardware and mechanical aspects now that we’ve got a quite stable platform, […]
No Comments » - Posted in Robotics by dani
Monday, September 26th, 2011
SecuDroid - Android Anti Theft Loss app Review
Google is now activating over 500,000 devices each day, growing at 4.4% week on week. This huge raise, led to a big explosion of apps being downloaded from the Android Market, which - at the time of this writing - is 6,148,593,955 (more info at http://www.androlib.com/appstats.aspx).
Among these, there is one particular kind of application which is potentially […]
No Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by dani
Monday, July 18th, 2011
Campus Party 2011
I’m back from the 15th edition of Campus Party and it was a great success for us regarding the competitions we took part in. Here are the results:
Web/Mobile App Development Challenge by Coritel (Accenture) - Innovation Area: 1st place!
“Best of Show” Robotics competition: 1st place
“Speed Runners” Robotics competition: 1st and 2nd places
“Campus Climbers” Robotics competition: […]
No Comments » - Posted in Robotics by dani
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Drive the uXbot from your Android device
I wrote an application for Android OS based devices to control the uXbot robot remotelly via Bluetooth. This has been my first experience with Android development and, even though the UI creation isn’t very straightforward, the rest of the features such as Bluetooth discovering, pairing or sensor data acquisition have been fairly easy.
Features:
Inertial control using […]
No Comments » - Posted in Robotics by dani
Monday, April 11th, 2011
Silvestre & uXbot - Line Following Champions
Last week, we attended two of the most important championships in Spain with Silvestre and uXbot.
In Hispabot, the track had a ramp which was pretty challenging for our robots since they were not designed with this in mind. The major problem was that the robots got blind for a while in their way up and […]
No Comments » - Posted in Robotics, Uncategorized by dani
Monday, December 6th, 2010
uXbot Bluetooth Bootloader
I’ve never liked to use an external hardware to program microcontrollers, so one of the reasons to choose the LPC1343 microcontroller for the uXbot robot was its internal USB MSC bootloader which enables users to download their firmwares by dragging & dropping files into a flash drive. However, when you’re working in your robot, sometimes […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Robotics by dani
Sunday, November 28th, 2010
ARM Cortex-m3 - Remote debugging using GDB (1)
One of the things I’ve found more interesting and useful in Robotics is debugging.
Most of the time we use to print out traces through a serial port and, the luckiest ones, who own a JTAG emulator, can dig deeper into their bugs but always with a cable plugged.
So, now thanks to the excellent Espardino project and […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Uncategorized by dani
Saturday, November 6th, 2010
SPI Communications - Slave Core VHDL
SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) protocol is a synchronous serial data link which operates in full duplex mode. It’s got a higher throughput compared to I2C or SMBus and it’s very useful for high speed short-range communications.
The SPI protocol specifies the following signals:
SCLK — Serial Clock (output from master)
MOSI/SIMO — Master Output, Slave Input (output from […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Electronics, Robotics by dani
Tuesday, October 12th, 2010
FPGA - Actel ProASIC3 First Steps
I want to show you how easy is to start playing around with FPGAs. The following example is based on the Actel A3P250 Devel board programmed with the microJTAG board.
The idea is simple: we’re going to design a PWM module and make the on-board leds flashing at different rates. The RTL design of the PWM module […]
2 Comments » - Posted in Uncategorized by dani
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
CRJET 2010 International Robotics Competition
Last 8th October took place the 3rd edition of the CRJET International Robotics Competition in Cataluña.
Silvestre was the WINNER of the Line Following Robots category. During the qualifying session in the morning, Silvestre set the fastest time, completing 3 laps to the 11.752 meters track in 14.02 seconds (2.5m/s average speed). Piolin - Silvestre’s little brother […]
