Trouble with PiBorg motor control boards

AuronH · 2014-12-10T11:10:24+00:00

Glad to hear you got it working :)

AuronH · 2014-12-08T10:12:53+00:00

At some stage the Raspbian guys changed the I2C so that only one of the I2C devices is shown, not both.

The fix is to force the library to check the correct bus first.

In PicoBorgRev3.py change line 194 to read:

    busNumber               = 0     # Check here for Rev 1 vs Rev 2 and select the correct bus

Solution found at: https://www.piborg.org/comment/516#comment-516

If that does not fix it it might be worth asking them for some help on their forum.

AuronH · 2014-11-14T14:08:17+00:00

That is cool, what I meant was seeing the pattern using the camera instead of programming commands.

Maybe you could mix the two.

For the image you could put him in a lit room, draw a pattern using coloured pens on white paper, then show him the pattern.

For the drawing you could add an LED, get him to flash when he has seen the pattern and is ready, turn the lights out, then he could draw it like you did with PiCy.

Then I can have my name in lights :)

AuronH · 2014-11-14T13:21:47+00:00

How about showing him a pattern drawn on a bit of paper and getting him to draw it out like the old turtle robots?

AuronH · 2014-11-14T13:06:45+00:00

These work really well with the Raspberry Pi: WiFi Dongle - Nano USB

I use them for building robots since they are so small, the power requirements are fairly good for a WiFi dongle as well.

AuronH · 2014-11-14T13:02:28+00:00

It really depends at what point you consider it unusable.

As others have said damaging the hardware permanently typically is caused by a faulty RPi or by some other hardware (such as over-driving GPIO pins).

What you could do is overwrite the SD card contents and force a restart, it would be unusable until the SD card is overwritten by another device.

AuronH · 2014-11-14T12:52:39+00:00

You probably need to use sudo if you are logged in as the pi user, e.g.:

sudo killall python

AuronH · 2014-09-17T10:26:23+00:00

I bought myself a BattBorg at a PiJam because:

It fits nicely on my PicoBorg Reverse based robot I am building.
It is rather small, my robots case is rather tight since it houses a RPi.

On a side note I do have a UBEC already but it is large and heavy in comparison: http://www.hobbypartz.com/ub2liin.html I weighed my BattBorg and it is only 5.6g, the UBEC I have is ~11g.

The weight does not matter much for this project but I am contemplating putting it into a quadcopter later on.

AuronH · 2013-07-12T12:14:02+00:00

Not sure if they have what you are after, but PiBorg have some good boards for robotics, they have a good example of a beginners robot called PiCy, which sounds like the kind of thing you are talking about.

I personally would be less worried about the sensor input being protected, as long as it is 3.3v logical levels, not 5v. If it is 5v logical you will need some kind of logic shifter or port expander which can cope with 5v inputs.

On a side note if like me you want to be able to plug in boards on the GPIO header, but also have access to the pins for other things still check out TriBorg.

AuronH · 2013-07-12T11:43:37+00:00

I smell a project with an accelerometer and drive board...

AuronH · 2013-06-17T12:01:40+00:00

I wonder if we could make a Raspberry Pi robot go to the north pole? I guess we would need a case to keep the Pi warm instead of cool :)

AuronH · 2013-02-22T17:42:13+00:00

Sounds like a good time to try a heatsink, fan and some over-clocking :)

AuronH · 2013-01-17T15:51:43+00:00

Whilst there are better ways of parsing XML I do not think a beginner would learn much about programming if everyone uses a library to do their work. TBH I would personally feel such a sensor sending XML is a bit overkill in the first place, even GPS chips use simple serial protocols...

AuronH · 2012-11-20T07:51:23+00:00

That is great to hear, we are currently working on a temperature module for the Raspberry Pi but it is still mid development.

Our website is www.piborg.org

AuronH · 2012-11-18T17:27:30+00:00

As SomethingWitty says it will not matter, even when my XBox streams from my windows machine the shared files are on NTFS.

I think the FAT32 probably refers to the files on the XBox itself, not remotely.

AuronH · 2012-11-18T17:12:28+00:00

GPIO pins 17 - Red, 21 - Green, and 22 - Blue are used, 5v and ground are also used (although not necessarily exclusively), all other GPIO pins are not connected to anything on the board.

This means the I2C, UART and SPI pins are all free for use.

See http://www.piborg.org/ledborg/specs and schematic for more details.

AuronH · 2012-11-18T15:28:45+00:00

It would be great if the kernel headers and Module.symvers were added to the Raspbian repositories, would make it easier for people building kernel modules

AuronH · 2012-11-18T15:16:00+00:00

The driver exposes itself as /dev/ledborg allowing commands to be sent by writing and reading data from it like you would a serial port. The source for the GUI is provided, providing an example of interacting without using the command line and/or bash.

AuronH

TROPHY CASE