http://dani.foroselectronica.es Robotics and Electronics Weblog Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:58:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/silvestre-getting-ready-for-2012-161/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/secudroid-android-anti-theft-loss-app-review-159/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/campus-party-2011-156/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/drive-the-uxbot-from-your-android-device-155/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/silvestre-uxbot-line-following-champions-148/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/uxbot-bluetooth-bootloader-146/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/arm-cortex-m3-remote-debugging-using-gdb-1-144/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/spi-communications-slave-core-vhdl-137/ 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 ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/fpga-actel-proasic3-first-steps-133/ 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). ... http://dani.foroselectronica.es/crjet-2010-international-robotics-competition-132/