Category Archives: Projects

Firefly Robots

Posted on October 13, 2021 by peter

Some fireflies exhibit a remarkable behavior where their flashes can synchronize with one another. I am interested in seeing if I can reproduce this behavior in small tabletop robots. These robots may use lights and light sensors to reproduce the … Continue reading →

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3D Printed, Snap Fit Enclosures

Posted on September 30, 2021 by peter

This week I brought my 3D printer out from the attic because I wanted to build some electronics enclosures. I’m fairly experienced with CAD and Fusion 360. However, my experience with building boxes is limited to laser cutting. This blog … Continue reading →

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Robocars Racing

Posted on January 21, 2020 by peter

The other day a commenter to this blog’s signature included a reference to Robocar racing. I had never heard of that before and learned about an amazing activity involving developing and racing self-driving RC-style, scale-model cars. Robocars is sort of … Continue reading →

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Indoor Mobile-Robot Localization

Posted on July 26, 2019 by peter

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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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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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 →

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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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