Author Archives: peter

Introducing RomiPi: A ROS Package for the Pololu Romi

Posted on May 2, 2019 by peter

The Pololu Romi with 32u4 Control Board is a robust, low-cost (<$150), educational robotics platform that supports interfacing with the Raspberry Pi computing platform. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a robotics framework used throughout academics and industry which supports … Continue reading →

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Bluetooth Joystick (DS4) with ROS

Posted on April 27, 2019 by peter

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!

Posted on January 25, 2019 by peter

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 →

Posted in Projects, Robotics, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

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

Posted on December 29, 2018 by peter

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

Posted on December 21, 2018 by peter

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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Kuri Robot Notes

Posted on November 12, 2018 by peter

One of my colleagues had an interesting box, it turned out to contain a Kuri home robot from the shuttered Mayfield Robotics company. This post is a collection point for my notes on playing with it. I thought it might … Continue reading →

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Fast Analog Read on Arduino

Posted on April 11, 2018 by peter

The Arduino AnalogRead(pin) function is simple to use, but can’t be called faster than about 10 kHz. Audio needs sample rates closer to 40 kHz. This post will be a notepad of resources and notes related to high speed analog … Continue reading →

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NFC v3 Reader with Arduino

Posted on February 18, 2018 by peter

Turns out there are playing cards available with NFC capability embedded in them. I’m helping a friend make an automated bridge table. The step I’m helping with in particular is reading the card inputs and pushing the information on to … Continue reading →

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Three-Robot Formation Localization

Posted on February 16, 2018 by peter

Visualizations of three-robot formation localizing using only range-only and range-bearing. I have recorded screencasts from Autodesk Fusion 360’s sketch view to help visualize the limits of the constraints. In the videos, the Hexagon represents a robot fixed at the origin … Continue reading →

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Manual Exposure Control of OpenCV Video

Posted on February 10, 2018 by peter

My experiments robot localization have been frustrated by blurry images. Blurry images have been making estimating the position of Aruco tag boards difficult with OpenCV. In my case, the camera is mounted to a moving robot that is photographing tags … Continue reading →

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