It's been an incredible ride... never in my dreams would I have thought that I, Neil Emeigh, would be capable of building robots that are as scalable as our design is. Industrial robots are not far fetched from our knowledge at this point, and that's something I still have to pinch myself for to remind myself it is real.
Our robot had many hiccups and headaches, but we finally achieved a final product that we set out for. During the initial build phase we have come across MANY design flaws that we plan on making more efficient in the future. This prototype is for demonstration and proof-of-concept that we are able to do such a thing.
Here is the robot in action:
[video]
Taylor and I both plan on continuing with the build of this robot in the future, as well as many other robotic designs we have already brainstormed up. This was such an incredible experience that I'll never forget. I owe my thanks to the CS department and Dr. Hastings for allowing us to do such a project and for believing in us throughout the journey.
Total hours: We slacked on keeping track of this as the time required for this project was too many and we were more concerned with getting a final product done than recording all the details with the steps we took. Our project was a stretch to complete in a semester's time, but we put the hours in to get it finished on time. If I were to estimate, it took us about 100-150 hours each from start to finish.
Sunday, December 14, 2014
Friday, December 5, 2014
Post #10 - Motors Running!!!!
After a stressful week, we finally got the motors moving thanks to Dr. Trantham (Physics department). Although he suggested our power source was too strong, we determined that wasn't the case and saw that his wiring diagram suggested our wires weren't set up correctly. After switching the wires around our motor moved!! This was SUCH a relieving feeling and an incredible boost of motivation.
Throughout the week we played with stepper motor libraries and different settings. We attached the motor to our robot frame (found on Taylor's blog: tfcsis496.blogspot.com) and had it spinning as it should.
Next week, our final full week of working on it, will be spent hooking up the solenoid valves and hooking up the robot to UNK's internet to prepare for our live demonstration.
Throughout the week we played with stepper motor libraries and different settings. We attached the motor to our robot frame (found on Taylor's blog: tfcsis496.blogspot.com) and had it spinning as it should.
Next week, our final full week of working on it, will be spent hooking up the solenoid valves and hooking up the robot to UNK's internet to prepare for our live demonstration.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Post #9 - Hooking up the motors
This week was entirely spent trying to get a motor moving. We had to contact an outside source (Dr. Ron Tuttle from UNK) to give us some advice since Taylor and I have zero prior experience with electronics.
After meeting with him, we started plugging stuff in. Our current state with the robot is that our power source has power (good), the motor driver that controls the motor has a green light (good), however when we try sending power to the actual motor, the driver flashes red (bad). We are debugging and meeting with Dr. Tuttle again next week.
Total Time: 6 hours
After meeting with him, we started plugging stuff in. Our current state with the robot is that our power source has power (good), the motor driver that controls the motor has a green light (good), however when we try sending power to the actual motor, the driver flashes red (bad). We are debugging and meeting with Dr. Tuttle again next week.
Total Time: 6 hours
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Post #8 - Web Page Finished
We have decided to go with an online version of the ordering system. This online website can be accessed from anywhere in the world, allowing people to 'order' drinks wherever they are with their mobile phones. The Raspberry Pi will then read the database from this external server and handle the orders accordingly.
The webpage can be found here:
http://zonbandit.com/order.php
This page will be seen by the customer. It allows them to order a drink that goes into the queue.
http://zonbandit.com/admin.php
This page asks for all the liquids currently set up in the robot.
http://zonbandit.com/admin2.php
This page asks how they would make the drink by selecting the combination of liquids from the previous page.
Time spent: 12 hours (learning PHP and serverside coding)
The webpage can be found here:
http://zonbandit.com/order.php
This page will be seen by the customer. It allows them to order a drink that goes into the queue.
http://zonbandit.com/admin.php
This page asks for all the liquids currently set up in the robot.
http://zonbandit.com/admin2.php
This page asks how they would make the drink by selecting the combination of liquids from the previous page.
Time spent: 12 hours (learning PHP and serverside coding)
Monday, November 17, 2014
Post #7 - WiFi Fixed (Finally) and Webpage Beginnings
After countless (15+) hours of trying to find a solution to the WiFi intermittent connection, I stumbled across an idea from someone - the Raspberry Pi wasn't able to give enough power to the WiFi adapter. Supposedly, these adapters take quite a bit of bower (over 500 mA), and the Pi can only give a max of 500 mA through its USB ports. This was all theory, but I as I researched I found similar recommendations.
Thus, my quest to find a powered USB hub was on. I tried finding a simple, cheap, one, but there were NO recommendations that I could find that were suited for the Pi (so that it didn't fry it). After searching long enough, I settled on a little more expensive solution - PiHub (http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pihub).
Once I plugged the powered hub in, everything was working perfectly! WiFi was no longer dropping, and I could now power all my USB gadgets through this hub instead of the Pi. What a relief!
----
Next up this week was getting our database set up. We have decided that since the whole system must be connected to a WiFi network in order to be controlled via user's phones, then we had no reason to keep the database locally on the Pi. Therefore, we will be hosting the database and webpage on our own server which will allow people to access it from ANYWHERE, and off the WiFi network.
The beginnings of a great webpage:
http://roqetmarketing.com/drinkmixer/hey.php
Thus, my quest to find a powered USB hub was on. I tried finding a simple, cheap, one, but there were NO recommendations that I could find that were suited for the Pi (so that it didn't fry it). After searching long enough, I settled on a little more expensive solution - PiHub (http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pihub).
Once I plugged the powered hub in, everything was working perfectly! WiFi was no longer dropping, and I could now power all my USB gadgets through this hub instead of the Pi. What a relief!
----
Next up this week was getting our database set up. We have decided that since the whole system must be connected to a WiFi network in order to be controlled via user's phones, then we had no reason to keep the database locally on the Pi. Therefore, we will be hosting the database and webpage on our own server which will allow people to access it from ANYWHERE, and off the WiFi network.
The beginnings of a great webpage:
http://roqetmarketing.com/drinkmixer/hey.php
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Post #6 - More Wifi Issues
Wifi is becoming a bit of a pain. It seems that when the internet/router goes down at my home, the DHCP is having troubles renewing the lease (even after I set the time to only 10 seconds to renew). Anyways, manually running some commands got it up and working for me (below). I suspect I may have to have some detection in the program that if the wifi is down, try to run these commands via a shell script.
Link to post that solved my issue:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=72282&p=521088
1. sudo dhclient -v -r wlan0
2. ifconfig
3. sudo dhclient -v wlan0
Will update this post if I find another, simpler, way to get around this.
Update 1:
After hours and hours of research, this appears to not work. I finally came across a possible lead:
iwlist wlan0 scan
Returns my wifi connection sometimes, and sometimes not. This gave me some extra search terms to try and figure out a possible fix. After coming across a post about power issues, I have determined (for now) that the wifi adapter I am using requires too much power. The Raspberry Pi only outputs a certain amount of volts/amps, which wasn't enough, causing intermittent connection problems.
I have ordered a powered USB hub (http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pihub) to ideally fix the issue.
Link to post that solved my issue:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=72282&p=521088
1. sudo dhclient -v -r wlan0
2. ifconfig
3. sudo dhclient -v wlan0
Will update this post if I find another, simpler, way to get around this.
Update 1:
After hours and hours of research, this appears to not work. I finally came across a possible lead:
iwlist wlan0 scan
Returns my wifi connection sometimes, and sometimes not. This gave me some extra search terms to try and figure out a possible fix. After coming across a post about power issues, I have determined (for now) that the wifi adapter I am using requires too much power. The Raspberry Pi only outputs a certain amount of volts/amps, which wasn't enough, causing intermittent connection problems.
I have ordered a powered USB hub (http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/pihub) to ideally fix the issue.
Thursday, October 30, 2014
Post #5 - Raspberry Pi Setup
As I am the one working with the majority of the programming for this project, I have began setting up the Raspberry Pi.
Issues:
1.
WIFI!! - I got it connected originally using this article:
http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/
Worked fine for a week solid. Then our router at home got reset and things got all messed up. After debugging for 2 hours I still had no resolve. The next day I checked up on it and it was working again. I BELIEVE the issue was caused by the DHCP lease not renewing (the default lease renewal is 36000 seconds, or 10 hours!), so I changed that to 600 seconds for any future problems. (see next post -- NOT WORKING)
Installations:
1. Arduino IDE
Followed this guide to install and connect Arduino:
http://razzpisampler.oreilly.com/ch10.html
2. Raspberry Pi to Arduino connection:
http://blog.oscarliang.net/connect-raspberry-pi-and-arduino-usb-cable/
3. MySql was needed (simple installation). All MySql is done locally right now. We may move to online servers later on.
4. Adafruit IDE - probably the best find of this entire project. I was having problems figuring out how to program efficiently, timely, and making sure it would work on the Pi. I tried setting up a similar environment on my Windows (tried a VMWare box, all on Windows, etc) and my first conclusion was to use TightVNC which is a remote controller to the Raspberry Pi. This allowed me to work on my PC that I was comfortable using, while working directly on the Pi. However, the Pi has minimal hardware so the speeds that I could program at were drastically reduced. ALSO, I couldn't find any Python IDE to work on the Pi, so I was just coding in a simple notepad file. Not good!
Then, I came across the wonderful Adafruit IDE. Wow is it incredible! This allows me to program on my desktop computer all via my BROWSER. The code I change in the browser is automatically pushed to a Bitbucket repository, which is then automatically pushed onto the Pi. Talk about cool!
http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/
6. Apache and PHP5 installed
7. Other miscellaneous things were installed. Not much importance.
Edit: Through a lot of pain, I've found out that you should install the WebIDE LAST before anything else. It's caused a lot of problems with other installations and is done best when it's installed last.
Issues:
1.
WIFI!! - I got it connected originally using this article:
http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/
Worked fine for a week solid. Then our router at home got reset and things got all messed up. After debugging for 2 hours I still had no resolve. The next day I checked up on it and it was working again. I BELIEVE the issue was caused by the DHCP lease not renewing (the default lease renewal is 36000 seconds, or 10 hours!), so I changed that to 600 seconds for any future problems. (see next post -- NOT WORKING)
Installations:
1. Arduino IDE
Followed this guide to install and connect Arduino:
http://razzpisampler.oreilly.com/ch10.html
2. Raspberry Pi to Arduino connection:
http://blog.oscarliang.net/connect-raspberry-pi-and-arduino-usb-cable/
3. MySql was needed (simple installation). All MySql is done locally right now. We may move to online servers later on.
4. Adafruit IDE - probably the best find of this entire project. I was having problems figuring out how to program efficiently, timely, and making sure it would work on the Pi. I tried setting up a similar environment on my Windows (tried a VMWare box, all on Windows, etc) and my first conclusion was to use TightVNC which is a remote controller to the Raspberry Pi. This allowed me to work on my PC that I was comfortable using, while working directly on the Pi. However, the Pi has minimal hardware so the speeds that I could program at were drastically reduced. ALSO, I couldn't find any Python IDE to work on the Pi, so I was just coding in a simple notepad file. Not good!
Then, I came across the wonderful Adafruit IDE. Wow is it incredible! This allows me to program on my desktop computer all via my BROWSER. The code I change in the browser is automatically pushed to a Bitbucket repository, which is then automatically pushed onto the Pi. Talk about cool!
http://raspberrypihq.com/how-to-add-wifi-to-the-raspberry-pi/
6. Apache and PHP5 installed
7. Other miscellaneous things were installed. Not much importance.
Edit: Through a lot of pain, I've found out that you should install the WebIDE LAST before anything else. It's caused a lot of problems with other installations and is done best when it's installed last.
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