control info

Submitted by juyles on Wed, 04/29/2015 - 15:48

Forums:

I am thinking of purchasing a Diddyborg and have some questions?

What are the dimensions of the Diddyborg, and specifically what are the dimensions
of the upper deck?

What is the weight of the vehicle?

Do you supply blank panels to support additional devices above the existing top deck?

In reading previous posts I understand you are using netcat to receive video from the
on board camera. Are you able to send commands to the pi controlller using netcat.

Does netcat require specific software to interact with software generated commands?

A little background will perhaps help in answering the questions.

My application would require the mounting of a arm upon the Diddyborg, and
would involve receiving two video streams, one from the pi-camera on the vehicle,
and one from a IR camera mounted on the arm, as well as being able to send
commands both to the vehicle and the arm, and cameras. There would be a fair
amount of positional data being returned from the vehicle, data from the arm,
and data from other sensors.

Thanks you.

Juyles

piborg's picture

piborg

Thu, 04/30/2015 - 15:50

An assembled DiddyBorg is approx. 1.3Kg Top plate and bottom plate are 190mmx120mm. You can purchase perpsex plates separately,
in black or clear:

https://www.piborg.org/diddyborg/black-perspex
https://www.piborg.org/diddyborg/clear-perspex

If you are intending to put a deck above by using another set of 40mm posts, this is possible, but you will possibly want to replace all the posts with both sides being a screw hole –
in order for the platform to be stable, the screws should penetrate approx. 6mm or more into the post, and this wouldn’t occur with the supplied posts (approx. 3mm).

We are using netcat to transfer the Raspberry Pi video stream to another machine.
Put simply netcat just copies live data to another machine, it is probably not the best way to send commands.

I would recommend something like the following:

  • Video stream via netcat for the Raspberry Pi camera
  • Video stream via netcat for the IR camera
  • Python script or similar for controlling the DiddyBorg and arm with some network streams:
    • Data stream for sensors
    • Data stream for the arm
    • Data stream for the position
    • Command stream for both the arm and DiddyBorg

If you have a look at the RemoteKeyBorg example script for PiCy (https://www.piborg.org/remotekeyborg) you can see an example of sending commands from one machine to another.
Data streams can be sent in the same way, just from the Raspberry Pi to the other machine instead.

You will probably want to look at threading so that you can run all of the code in a single script.
It can be a bit of a complicated topic for beginners, we found this guide helpful in explaining how to use them: http://pymotw.com/2/threading/
If you look at the diddyJoyBall.py example we use some threaded code, we also used the global keyword to make objects accessible to many threads.

juyles

Fri, 05/01/2015 - 13:49

Thanks for all the info. Will be placing an order soon.

Juyles

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