PicoBorg Reverse and DiddyBorg

Not sure the best place to put this, but here goes...

Has anyone considered adding a wheel rotation sensor to the Diddy's center wheel on each side? I'm thinking a chopper wheel and a photo sensor. But perhaps Hall effect instead?

Would be very useful for measuring relative distance, and thus for mapping out a floor plan in a room.

Thanks!
'sig

Hi

In general, with the PiBorg reverse and DiddyBorg motors, is it safe to switch the motor direction instantaneously? Or is it preferable to ramp the current from one level/direction to another? I'm thinking that there might be large current spikes if the voltage is reversed whilst the platform is in motion.

Best wishes
Kevin

Hi PiBorg

With the announcement of the Pi 3, I have the expected question.

Is DiddyBorg and all your boards compatible with the Pi 3.

I am assuming so, within reason, as the new Pi appears to be basically the same as the pi2. With the added built-in WiFi and BT.

Cheers

Chris

Hello All,

This is following on from the low battery thread and some other thoughts I have had for the DiddyBorg.

Low Battery Thread - https://www.piborg.org/node/1956

My plans are to have the DiddyBorg operate in an autonomous mode within the house, idea is to travel round and monitor the environmental conditions (air quality/temperature/humidity etc.) That's the ultimate aim.

In addition I am looking at fitting a shutdown button, and power on/off switch.

Hi

I would be very grateful if you could tell me the size (diameter) of the wheels, and the length of the motor assembly. That's the standard, 6v motor, not the go-faster model :)

Incidentally, would you be prepared to sell the DiddyBorg motors and base plate separately, without the rest of the bits?

Best wishes
Kevin

Hi folks

Is anybody aware of any work being done to use a camera (or perhaps two cameras) for proximity detection? I appreciate that ultrasonic sensors are more widely used for this application and, while that seems to work for bats, we humans seem to manage with eyes. The ultrasonic thingies aren't expensive, but I've already got a camera on board.

Best wishes
Kevin

Hi

This is a follow-on to a question I asked last week. Because I'm writing all the code myself in C, I want to ensure I can make the Reverse behave the way I want it to, before I bite the bullet and order a bunch of motors.

Can I simulate the behaviour of the motor in its PWM environment with, for example, a simple R/C low-pass filter? Of course it doesn't need to be an exact model -- I just need to see that the motor voltage can be made to go up and down and not exceed the rated voltage.

Hi,

I've created an mbed driver (which simply put is a C++ class wrapping the i2c calls) for the PicoBorgReverse; it was based on code from the Arduino library found on this forum.

It should be considered beta, for one thing it currently has no stepper support, but that would be straight forward to add.

It's been tested with the Nordic nRF51822 based BBC micro:bit riding a 4Borg, but it's not dependant on the micro:bit and should work with any mbed compatible board that has i2c support.

Hi

Is the DiddyBorg no longer being sold by Amazon? I was just about to place an order, and I noticed it wasn't there any more. I appreciate that I can order direct from PiBorg, but I have a bunch of Amazon vouchers :)

Best wishes
Kevin

I am using your code for performMove() from diddySequence in my program. My Diddy looks around, finds a direction symbol by colour, using cv2.contours, drives up to it and when close enough stops, tries to identify the symbol using cv2.FlannBasedMatcher and if successful (sometimes!) executes a left or right turn.

The code is based on diddyJoyBall but uses v4l2 and cv2.video capture instead of piCamera. The image processing routine runs in a separate thread (only a single thread).

When I run diddySequence the performMove() .........