Pandora Controlled Car


Thats pretty cool. Did you design the touchscreen control software yourself? Its neat. Im an rc fan myself.Helis mostly. Edit, Just saw your website. You designed all the software too, cool. post a video when you get wireless working, should be cool.
 
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Awesome :D


Though why don't you use the nubs for steering?


Seems more comfortable than a touchscreen :)


Or is this planned?
 
Touch controls by default? This isn't an iPhone, you know. You should be ashamed.
 
Iphone ah yes made by apple......Who would sue anything that moves. Soon enough they will accidentaly sue themselves if they keep it up.
 
Nice, i like that..


*imagine* to live in a house that is fully controlled by pandora [of course it can be controlled manually, as well]. Opening doors, switch on/off lights, turn on cafe-maker.., auto-play prawn movies after 23:00 :) ..excellent
 
Thanks!

EvilDragon said:
Awesome :D


Though why don't you use the nubs for steering?


Seems more comfortable than a touchscreen :)


Or is this planned?
Click to expand...

Well, all steering, speed and blinkymode can also be selected by d-pad and action buttons.


About the nubs: Not really familiar with coding for them, and also, steering is not done by a servo but with another dc motor and a spring to center. So it's Left-Center-right anyway, no inbetweens.

Matenrou said:
looks cool, touch so its easy to port to other devices?
Click to expand...

Gui is coded with Penjin, that should be easy. The communication part is a bit harder, but should not be anything too hard for an experienced coder

Simon h. said:
You should rig a camera and some how get blue tooth going =]
Click to expand...

Wireless is next, not sure about camera's for this project though, trying to keep this relatively simple since it's my first major hardware project. Also, the inside of the car is pretty filled up already ;)


But again, thanks for the positive feedback guys!
 
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MarkoeZ said:
About the nubs: Not really familiar with coding for them, and also, steering is not done by a servo but with another dc motor and a spring to center. So it's Left-Center-right anyway, no inbetweens.
Click to expand...
Reading the nubs isn't that hard. If you put them into joystick mode then you can just read the joystick character devices (typically /dev/input/js1 or /dev/input/js2).


These produce a stream of bytes corresponding to the following struct (so each 8 bytes is an event):



Code: 
struct js_event {

  __u32 time;   /* timestamp in milliseconds */

  __s16 value;  /* value, just read a few samples to determine the range */

  __u8 type;    /* event type (0x01: button press, 0x02: axis movement, 0x80: initialization) */

  __u8 number;  /* axis / button number */

};

[edit]


I like the controlled car. If you can, you should mount a small camera on it and stream the data to your pandora :)


[/edit]
 
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Caine said:
Reading the nubs isn't that hard. If you put them into joystick mode then you can just read the joystick character devices (typically /dev/input/js1 or /dev/input/js2).


These produce a stream of bytes corresponding to the following struct (so each 8 bytes is an event):



Code: 
struct js_event {

  __u32 time;   /* timestamp in milliseconds */

  __s16 value;  /* value, just read a few samples to determine the range */

  __u8 type;    /* event type (0x01: button press, 0x02: axis movement, 0x80: initialization) */

  __u8 number;  /* axis / button number */

};

[edit]


I like the controlled car. If you can, you should mount a small camera on it and stream the data to your pandora :)


[/edit]
Click to expand...

Thanks for the nub tips! But i think can get them to work, Penjin even has functionality for them i believe.


It's just that with 2 hand soldered modules, 2 pre built modules (one hacked) and 2 different software projects (pandora and MSP car software) i really kept things quite basic for the first tests. Believe me, with so many custom components, debugging is hell... ;)


Development will just continue though, so will probably follow soon!


And about the camera's, i don't know what hardware i would need. I looked into bluetooth, but that's just way too expensive for this small project. TI has some nice wireless stuff that i could probably get to work with the pandora ext connector and the car for not too much. But again, need to investigate.


Cheers!
 
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I know that there are many who want video input on the Pandora I hope it happens someday soon.
 
Jourdy288 said:
Nice work! When'll you do a predator drone?
Click to expand...
Planned for may next year. Next question? ;)

PokeParadox said:
Penjin does have nub support, you just need to switch the nubs into game mode with a script as before you launch the app. :)
Click to expand...
Yeah thought i remembered something like that. Been years since i touched nub code though (yeah, really that long, late 2008)


First need to clean out some last bugs in the car and pandora software, then i'll look into adding nub drive/steering. Because Drivespeed SHOULD be able to be analog nub controlled (with some conversions inbetween ofcourse).


Interesting...


Cheers!
 
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Well turns out Bluetooth does not have to be expensive after all.


A guy from the MSP430 forum pointed me to This Device


Don't know about quality yet, but for 5 euro i'm willing to take a gamble. If anyone is interested i will post my findings here once it arrives and i get it to work (or not).


Also been debugging the Pandora control software. No more missed button presses or releases, pretty damn smooth driving now :)


Cheers!
 
404 said:
Really fascinating I must say, at least if I want to sound like an old gentleman.


No, It's really cool.


Keep up the good work, maybe I'll be able to make something like this once. But for now I am only able to do modifications to scripts and consoles.
Click to expand...
err what? i'm no expert :huh: really, most people here could do this. It only takes some motivation to get started probably


Only bought my first soldering iron and started experimenting with microcontrollers 3 months ago... (and at 32 i'm not old, but no youngster either)


Did some basic Pandora/Penjin programming before, but not much more.


Thanks though :)
 
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How much trouble would it be for you to make a program for the Pandora and a thing (what's the word, library, script, program?) for the arduino with the bluetooth adapter? Features I would like are:


Send nub values, buttons, command codes (say one byte values) (based on either on screen buttons, keyboard buttons or typed commands) and text to arduino


Display multiple numeric values (update rate set by arduino) sent from arduino simultaneously, text sent by arduino (displayed in what would look like a command line interface)


I would like to be able to skin the program so I can control where values are displayed and how they would be labeled. The skin file could also contain maps for sending command codes.


Eventually I would like the program to display input from a webcam or other video device at full screen height.


Also, eventually I would be switching to something longer range (like xbee)


Finally, would one or two way (simultaneous not required) audio be possible?


Clearly I understand that this could be a lot of work and I would be happy to help with either time (but I have no coding experience) or perhaps something else ;)
 
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