A while back a college and friend from Debian and the Skolelinux / +Debian Edu project approached me, asking if I knew someone that might +be interested in helping out with a technology project he was running +as a teacher at L'école +franco-danoise - the Danish-French school and kindergarden. The +kids were building robots, rovers. The story behind it is to build a +rover for use +on +the dark side of the moon, and remote control it. As travel cost +was a bit high for the final destination, and they wanted to test the +concept first, he was looking for volunteers to host a rover for the +kids to control in a foreign country. I ended up volunteering as a +host, and last week the rover arrived. It took a while to arrive +after it was +built and shipped, because of customs confusion. Luckily we were +able fix it quickly with help from my colleges at work.
+ +This is what it looked like when the rover arrived. Note the cute +eyes looking up on me from the wrapping
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+Once the robot arrived, we needed to track +down batteries and figure out how to build custom firmware for it with +the appropriate wifi settings. I asked a friend if I could get two +18650 batteries from his pile of Tesla batteries (he had then from the +wrack of a crashed Tesla), so now the rover is running on Tesla +batteries.
+ +Building +the rover +firmware proved a bit harder, as the code did not work out of the +box with the Arduino IDE package in Debian Buster. I suspect this is +due to a unsolved + license problem +with arduino blocking Debian from upgrading to the latest version. +In the end we gave up debugging why the IDE failed to find the +required libraries, and ended up using the Arduino Makefile from the +arduino-mk Debian +package instead. Unfortunately the camera library is missing from +the Arduino environment in Debian, so we disabled the camera support +for the first firmware build, to get something up and running. With +this reduced firmware, the robot could be controlled via the +controller server, driving around and measuring distance using its +internal acoustic sensor.
+ +Next, With some help from my friend in Denmark, which commited the +camera library into the gitlab repository for me to use, we were able +to build a new and more complete version of the firmware, and the +robot is now up and running. This is what the "commander" web page +look like after taking a measurement and a snapshot:
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+If you want to learn more about this project, you can check out the +The +Dark Side Challenge Hackaday web pages.
+ +As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my +activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address +15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
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