Category Archives: Uncategorized

Stilt Pants – Materials and Copying Pattern

Today’s task is choosing materials for the stilt pants and creating a pattern for the shorts baseball stilt pants. Last week I created a test pants pattern, sewed it, and put it on Leah. When the shorts fabric arrives, I … Continue reading

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Memory Forensics with LiMe

Installing LiMe on a Kali Linux UTM virtual machine on an M1 Mac. In your Kali Linux Virtual Machine, enter the following on the command line: $ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list Uncomment the deb-src line. $ sudo apt update -y$ sudo … Continue reading

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Finicky Fiducial Frenzy

The RomiPi system uses the OpenCV standard ArucoTag system for indoor localization. Below is a picture of the markers representing the positions of robots Star, Port and French, relative to the RomiPi Jiffy. Additionally, the image shows the stream of … Continue reading

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Indoor Mobile-Robot Localization

The RomiPi project currently uses Aruco Tags for localization! While highly accurate, there are several limitations: cameras and vision are expensive, and visual obstructions limit use of cameras for certain carrying tasks. This pose will document various technologies and products … Continue reading

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Bluetooth Joystick (DS4) with ROS

ROS on a Raspberry Pi is great, but controlling your robot with an actual joystick-style controller is even better. Follows are my notes on connecting a Playstation Dual-Shock 4 (DS4) controller to ROS on Ubuntu with ds4drv. My robotics platform … Continue reading

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Bigger Buttons for the Pololu Zumo!

The Pololu Zumo 32u4 is an excellent educational robotics platform, but its buttons proved difficult to manipulate for some of the students in my classes. I designed these bigger buttons as an add-on for the Zumo. My hope is that … Continue reading

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Playing with Airfoils: NASA Prandtl-D Model Design and Build Experience Report

This post is a summary of my experience designing a model airplane flying wing based on the NASA Prandtl experimental flying wing. I then built a very simplified version with the help of Paul Voss using his CNC foam wing … Continue reading

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ROS Melodic on Raspberry Pi 3

There is no build of ROS Melodic for Rasbian! There is no Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) Desktop build for Raspberry Pi 3! Now what? Here’s my answer: Flash an SD card with the Xubuntu image linked here (use balenaEtcher): http://www.michaelvenz.com/2018/09/29/ros-melodic-on-raspberry-pi-3/ The … Continue reading

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IR Serial Communication with Pololu Zumo

Inter-robot communication may facilitate interesting cooperative behaviors. The Pololu Zumo robot platform has no inter-robot communication facility as-designed.  I am interested in repurposing the IR proximity sensors and the IR illuminators to receive and send serial data. The following are … Continue reading

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Three-Dimensional Aruco Boards

I am using Aruco tags to locate mobile robots relative to one another. I have mounted tags on the robots using cubes so that at least one tag will be visible from every side of the robot. In the picture … Continue reading

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