Thanks for all the help

NETMF & Gadgeteer
1

I just wanted to thank all of the folks here who have helped me build my cell phone controlled robot over the last couple of months. I am a complete hardware noob and it would have been difficult to do this without this board.

I built it based on the Robot Kit and the WiFly wireless board. I managed to jam into the device a fully function web server + plus a pretty extensive HTTP API to control the robot.

The work is not over, as I have many ideas for the robot, but it’s pretty much all software from here on out.

Here is the video of the device working.

Here is my wishlist for the new version of the RobotKit (if one is coming):

  1. Build it based on the EMX (or better) board. I want to be able to do video processing on it and need a lot more memory. E.g. my eventual goal is to build an open source tele-presence robot.

  2. Offer a motor that can do turning on its own (rather than tank-style turning).

  3. More powerful motor with more precise controls.

Thanks for all the hard work.

Thanks

2

That is some short teaser video :frowning: I want to see more. See your webpage where you control the robot.

We look forward to see even more projects in near future and seeing more added to this robot

3

Here is the first whack at the web page that controls the robot (it’s disconnected, so feel free to mess around).

http://www.vbrad.com/robot.htm

The idea was to use this page on a cell phone (iPhone or whatever else and use the 2 of your fingers to control the sliders, each of which corresponds to a wheel on the robot. However, I ran into some issues. On the iPhone, when I drag the sliders, it thinks I am trying to scroll the web page, so the entire page drags. Android does seem to support any dragging on a web page, period. So I’ll probably end up writing a simple iPhone app that controls the unit.

For now, I simply send it HTTP GET commands like this:

http://192.168.2.10/r?cmd=w&wheel1speed=45&wheel2speed=-45

4

I finally had the time to finish up the HTML code and pop it into Robot Kit resources. The new video of me controlling the robot from the iPhone is here:

[url]My Robot Takes the Next Step - YouTube

I’ll probably end up writing a native iPhone interface to the Robot because HTML (even HTML5) is just pain for creating remote control UIs.

5

Cool, show us the page on the iphone! 8)

6

I’ve gone through several iterations of the web page to control the robot and I am still not happy with the outcome.

My initial stab at it is what I ended up with for now:
http://www.vbrad.com/robot-good.htm

I also tried out the jQuery Mobile widgets. The Slider widget is really nice looking and very skinnable but they are in alpha 3 and definitely not ready for prime time. At the moment it’s one of the few sliders out there that works with mobile browsers, but has trouble with multi-touch which is what I was wanting to begin with.
http://www.vbrad.com/r2.htm

I also tried the jQuery tools, which is stable, but does not play well with mobile browsers or multi-touch.
http://www.vbrad.com/r3.htm

For this reason, I’ll probably have to write a native app for the iPhone or just wait for the jQuery Mobile to mature.

If you connect to these URLs on your iPhone, you’ll see the problems I mentioned.

Regards

7

I use prototype and scriptacoulus on the fez cobra. I think scriptacoulus has a slider too. But sliders do not work on touch enabled device. Instead of sliding you’re just scrolling through the page.

I’ll need something similar in a few days too, to control dimmed lights.

8

Check this out: http://www.zackgrossbart.com/hackito/touchslider/