After I helped out at the Monsanto event with the pro-evangelists, I was talking with one of their engineers and he told me about a few different solutions for my chain looseness issue. McMaster-Carr has a few solutions, each has pro’s and con’s in terms of space and cost. Floating Roller Chain ...

I got the system up and working and did a trial run last night only to see it act disappointingly slow.  I'm not 100% sure if it is my new laptop (Lenovo x300) or I am missing some bit of code. One big thing I forgot to do is to tune the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) again along with the code. How can I make a device that runs as a fixed rate faster?  Easy!  By turning off stuff that you don't need to send back, I can get get about a 30%+ jump in data speed.  What...

So I have a TTL to USB adapter this time instead of a TTL to Serial, then Serial to USB adapter and it isn't acting as fast as I think it should.  The chip is a FTDI chip and I did see an interesting performance boost messing with an option. This was at 16 by default and it caused everything to run at about 700 milliseconds where before I was at 10 milliseconds per cycle.  By chancing it to 1 millisecond, I'm at about 15'ish ms per cycle, not perfect but not horrible. I hope that...

I had an entire post on this, but after finding out it was a hardware failure, I'm less pissed but still at the same time, very pissed it took 2 days to get me back up and going. This issue prompted me to get going on my move to Applied Innovations.  I'll be posting videos of my move and how I pulled off things like getting the database off the server when I don't have direct access to that server.

I had the pleasure of attending Maker Faire this year and show off my self-balancing skateboard.  There was fun and some suffering in it. I had the pleasure of meeting some awesome people at SparkFun, Sun, Evil Mad Scientists, and Pleo.  Also I had my buddy Andy Konkol to attend.  He may be the panda. And then my smart ass mouth caused this to happen. So enough about the interesting folk, let me the story of the skateboard.  SparkFun sent me a replacement and I updated the source code to a working version.  Once the batteries were...

SparkFun rules, they are drop shipping me a new IMU unit! I’m totally going to be buying these guys a drink at Maker Faire. Time to see if I can’t do some phatty real-time coding while talking to thousands of people and not having it kill someone.  I may get some plywood and do testing inside my pelican case for safety.

I've been reading up on PID controllers and they actually make sense now.  It is a nice Saturday in St. Louis and I'm inside researching PID controllers.  Yes, I'm a nerd.  A very large nerd.  A nerd who's toy isn't playing nicely with him. So here is the break down of a PID controller as I see it along with how I'll be implementing it. P = Short term corrections I = Adds long-term precision D = This gives you a rough estimate of the velocity (delta position/sample time), which predicts where the position will...

The wonders of diagnostic applications and being ugly and not having everything fully hooked up.  I was iffy on the Kalman filter pulling out correct values but as soon as I talked with Filpe Varela, the original coder of the Kalman filter implementation I'm using, talked me through some of the values and wtf they actually meant, I think I got it!  Once I tuned in my accelerators, the angle estimates started working properly.  In doing this, my headache magically disappeared too. I actually only need the angle estimate for the X axis too. I...

I finished up the source for the most part last night.  I'm in South Dakota currently so I have to actually alter the program slightly to work without the motor controller present which actually would be a good idea. I did test it a few times on the skateboard last night too but it did not work properly.  I think the solution of testing this out without the hardware present is the way to go. One interesting bug I did find was with the Speed Controller was it returning data.  I'd do a query and it wouldn't always...

Andy Konkol and myself are attending Maker Faire this year.  I'm doing the skateboard segway and he is doing a LED sign mirror. Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame created an API wrapper for the beta brite signs a while back in VB.Net 1.1 and after hearing Konkol swear one too many times, I ported it to c# for him. Jeff does have a Protocol.vb file that personally, I would have broken down into individual files.  There are about 10 classes in there and a ton of enums.  I just felt dirty porting it as is.  Or maybe that...