Strobotics

I’m still alive…… Its been awhile between blog entries, unfortunately this is the busiest time of the year for me at work, the few months after the Australian financial year, projects are kicking off due to funding etc.  There is however light at the end of the tunnel and I’m hoping to get back to geeking very soon

I thought I’d let you know that a) I’m still alive, and b) what’s been happening on the development front.

In between work projects I’ve been porting the Contiki operating system to the widget as the underlying event framework for WidgetMesh.

I now have the Hello-world application up and running on the Atmega168 @10Mhz, no radio drivers or anything else for that matter just yet.  For those interested it’s been checked into SVN.  I’m learning a lot about Contiki and how it all fits in together (i.e. I know that I don’t know much at all about it)

On the hardware front the next iteration of the Widgetboard is idle, though pretty well stable as far as the design goes (might be a couple of small tweaks before boards get made).  I just need time and resources to get the next round of PCBs ordered and tested. 

Noteworthy design changes include:

• Standard smd or PTH crystal footprint, allows the use of a standard HC49 crystal of your choice.
• Lots of changes to the board supply side of things. Board voltage supply input range from 0.7V to 16VDC (probably beyond to 20VDC but just to be on the safe side…)  The core components are still powered  @ 3V
• Minor changes based from user feedback of the current board.
• A couple of optional onboard sensors to utilise the normally unused A6 and A7 analogue only ports, these can be disabled via onboard solder jumpers if these ports need to be used for something else, but has a temperature and light sensor, so the widget board can be used as a basic standalone wireless sensor.

I’ve been meaning to run off another batch of WidgetBoards and have been waiting for some processors, a month ago 40 Atmega328P processors arrived after a 5 week backorder, according to my vendor these were hard to get, hopefully supply issues will settle down after production catches up with the the initial demand for Atmega328P. 

All future widget boards will now have this processor as the default in the next batch of boards I make.

Sample parts I’ve been ordering for various future projects have been steadily rocking up and sitting in my ever growing inbox, the RFM22 arrived some time ago and I’ve not yet had time to play with them either   sigh

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, the blog and domain has been re-named to reflect more of my interests.  As a result the domain has now been fully moved across to http://blog.strobotics.com.au/ 

Please update your RSS feeds and bookmarks with the new address.  The old address is still active and will re-direct to the new domain name.

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As “Everything Robotics” just doesn’t seem to cut it anymore (I can just here the comments as people stumble across the site “hmm not much robotics happening here”). 

The blog now has a new name “Strobotics” (Stro-botics) which seems to reflect the content a little better don’t you think?

A new domain strobotics.com.au is now active, but the site is still pointing to the old domain for the time being.  I will eventually move everything over to the new domain,  I will however keep all domains pointing to this site indefinitely.

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My wife is a kindergarten teacher and in Australia, Christmas is the end of our school year and the start our summer break.  However this is also when student reports are due.   The School at which she works is a pretty expensive private school with what appears no lack of IT funding, however for some reason the Kindergarten and Pre-Primary classes are the only 2 classes not on the Schools Reporting system, Maze. 

(more…)

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Thanks to everyone who notified me of the forums being offline, they are now back up and running   Sorry for any inconvenience.

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Well I’m back from my short break away and arrived home to my inbox filled up with forum activation emails which I’ve identified a large sample as spam bots related. So to kickstart the forums off again I’ve upgraded to the latest version of phpBB3 which has much better features especially in the user management and (anti)spam areas.   All users and posts have successfully been migrated, however that if anyone had registered and NOT received their activation email prior to the upgrade then please re-register, or contact me.

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Unfortunately development has ground to a halt for me. 

Whilst repartitioning my laptop to give my system drive some more space (I REALLY dislike the default DELL partitioning of 20GB for c: and the rest for d:), I lost my development drive (and the rest of my data drive as well) with all my recent work on it, like the latest pcb I finished yesterday.  Luckily I have most of it backed up, however murphys law now comes into play and some of it was not. 

To cut a long store short I’ve had to resort to lowlevel recovery of my files, which at this point looks like I’ll recover 100% of my data…phew, but its slow work doing sector level file recovery of a 140GB worth of data!

On a brighter side, just received a shipping notice from batchpcb that my first lot of header boards for the RFM12 has been shipped, I’m hoping that they arrives before Christmas so I can play with them over the break.  My 2×6 2mm headers also arrived earlier this week.

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A friend of mine, Paul and I have been talking for sometime on setting up a robotics club here in the Southwest of Western Australia, anyway nothing has ever eventuated until now.  So to get the ball rolling I put a call up for expression of interest in starting a club on one of our local community portals, anyway I’ve had a good response from the local media.  I’ve done a couple of interviews with the local newspapers and one with with the local radio station this weekend.  Hopefully these will generate a bit of interest.

I’ve started a mailing list to help kick things off (found here).

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