blog/data/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon.txt

   1 Title: The space rover coquine, or how I ended up on the dark side of the moon
   2 Tags: english, robot
   3 Date: 2019-06-02 23:55
   4
   5 <p>A while back a college and friend from Debian and the Skolelinux /
   6 Debian Edu project approached me, asking if I knew someone that might
   7 be interested in helping out with a technology project he was running
   8 as a teacher at <a href="https://www.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/">L'école
   9 franco-danoise</a> - the Danish-French school and kindergarden.  The
  10 kids were building robots, rovers.  The story behind it is to build a
  11 rover for use
  12 <a href="http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/first-week-on-the-dark-side">on
  13 the dark side of the moon</a>, and remote control it.  As travel cost
  14 was a bit high for the final destination, and they wanted to test the
  15 concept first, he was looking for volunteers to host a rover for the
  16 kids to control in a foreign country.  I ended up volunteering as a
  17 host, and last week the rover arrived.  It took a while to arrive
  18 after <a href="http://blog.ecolefrancodanoise.dk/model-moms">it was
  19 built and shipped</a>, because of customs confusion.  Luckily we were
  20 able fix it quickly with help from my colleges at work.</p>
  21
  22 <p>This is what it looked like when the rover arrived.  Note the cute
  23 eyes looking up on me from the wrapping</p>
  24
  25 <img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-esken-med-det-rare-i.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
  26 <img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-den-ser-meg.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
  27 <img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-en-skrue-loes.jpeg" width="32%" style="clear:left"/>
  28
  29 <p style="text-align:left">Once the robot arrived, we needed to track
  30 down batteries and figure out how to build custom firmware for it with
  31 the appropriate wifi settings.  I asked a friend if I could get two
  32 18650 batteries from his pile of Tesla batteries (he had them from the
  33 wrack of a crashed Tesla), so now the rover is running on Tesla
  34 batteries.</p>
  35
  36 <p>Building
  37 <a href="https://gitlab.com/ecolefrancodanoise/arduino-efd/">the rover
  38 firmware</a> proved a bit harder, as the code did not work out of the
  39 box with the Arduino IDE package in Debian Buster.  I suspect this is
  40 due to a unsolved
  41 <a href="https://github.com/arduino/Arduino/pull/2703"> license problem
  42 with arduino</a> blocking Debian from upgrading to the latest version.
  43 In the end we gave up debugging why the IDE failed to find the
  44 required libraries, and ended up using the Arduino Makefile from the
  45 <a href="https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/arduino-mk">arduino-mk Debian
  46 package</a> instead.  Unfortunately the camera library is missing from
  47 the Arduino environment in Debian, so we disabled the camera support
  48 for the first firmware build, to get something up and running.  With
  49 this reduced firmware, the robot could be controlled via the
  50 controller server, driving around and measuring distance using its
  51 internal acoustic sensor.</p>
  52
  53 <p>Next, With some help from my friend in Denmark, which checked in the
  54 camera library into the gitlab repository for me to use, we were able
  55 to build a new and more complete version of the firmware, and the
  56 robot is now up and running.  This is what the "commander" web page
  57 look like after taking a measurement and a snapshot:</p>
  58
  59 <img src="http://www.hungry.com/~pere/blog/images/2019-06-02-robot-dark-side-of-moon-commander.png" width="40%" border="1" align="center"/>
  60
  61 <p>If you want to learn more about this project, you can check out the
  62 <a href="https://hackaday.io/project/164082-the-dark-side-challenge">The
  63 Dark Side Challenge</a> Hackaday web pages.</p>
  64
  65 <p>As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
  66 activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
  67 <b><a href="bitcoin:15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b">15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b</a></b>.</p>