Subject:
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Re: Roving Webcam Robot
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 4 Oct 2000 00:05:52 GMT
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Viewed:
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839 times
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Everything is battery powered, so it can run around loose. Unfortunatly, this
means it can only stay alive for about an hour, and I can't just leave it
online. The laptop is the main bottleneck. I have to turn off all power
management or else the laptop goes into sleep mode every 5 minutes. When the
power management is off, it cranks up the backlight of the display (which is
useless for my purposes), and it drains out the battery in just an hour or so.
Even worse, I have a really crummy ISP for dialup. Normally I use DSL, and
that is great, but the cordless modem is just for dialup. My dialup ISP is
really flakey, and I often get dumped or can not connect. And when I finally
connect, I get assigned a dynamic IP address, so I need to edit the web page.
I have been told that Webcam32 can automatically fix the IP address on the web
page, but I have not looked into this. All of the fiddling around takes
precious battery time, so in practice I only get a good half hour of run time
for 15 minutes of setup time. And then, my dial up connection or the network
is slow and the pictures refresh at a painfully slow rate sometimes.
All of this could be fixed.
First, if I could get 802.11b wireless ethernet to work, that would be a huge
help. Also, if I could kill the backlight on the laptop, I could probably get
at least 5 hours of run time.
My dream setup would have a garage for the robot where you could park it and
it could recharge itself. As long as the friendly online people took it back
into its garage, it could stay on all day. At least until someone found a way
to drive it into the toilet, or to catch the house on fire by breaking all of
the floor lamps or something like that.
Another problem about letting the public use it would be queueing. If multiple
people press buttons on my web page now, they would all be fighting for
control. Maybe WebBrick needs some code to handle multiple users with some
sort of queue.
I will try to set up wireless ethernet, but the last time I tried I managed to
screw up my LAN for a weekend and my wife was ready to kill me.
In lugnet.robotics, Kevin Loch writes:
> In lugnet.robotics, Amnon Silverstein writes:
> > Here is me with my roving webcam bot. This weekend I made an improved • version.
> > I used WebCam32 for the webcam, my WebBrick program for robot control over • IP,
> > NQC code for motor control, IBM's cordless modem, a USB to serial converter • to
> > get the tower to work with the Sony VAIO picturebook.
> > http://www.best.com/~amnon/Homepage/Games/AmnonRobot.jpg
> > http://www.best.com/~amnon/Homepage/Games/RobotDetail.jpg
> >
> > The NQC first centers the steering. I use a clutch gear and a rotation • counter
> > in the steering system. The code can detect a stall when the steering motor • is
> > running but the steering angle isn't changing. It also has a touch sensor • that
> > it uses to calibrate the rotation sensor so 0 is straight ahead. The little
> > antenna on the nose with the yellow wheel is to provide visual feedback
> > through the webcam of which way the front end is pointing.
> > The NQC also controls differential power to the two rear wheel drive motors,
> > to help it turn in addition to the steering.
> > My latest version of WebBrick lets you start any task on any program, so you
> > can have up to 50 buttons on the control web page. I wrote it in C++, and the
> > web control is in HTML and JavaScript. You can get WebBrick at:
> > http://www.best.com/~amnon/Homepage/Lego/
>
> Cool! Do you have the webcam up and running somewhre?
>
> KL
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