Dawn Robotics Forum

Welcome • Dawn Robotics Closing Down - Support Implications

2015-11-17T20:08:47+01:00

Hi all,

Some people may already know this based on this blog post, and the fact that we're running a closing down sale, but if not, unfortunately we're closing down, and indeed may already be closed, depending upon when you read this.

For people who have bought our products, please don't worry that you're going to be hung out to dry, support wise. I'll keep monitoring these forums periodically to try to answer any questions people may have. If you post here and don't get a reponse within a couple of days, please email helpdesk@dawnrobotics.co.uk, as notifications from the forum don't always seem to come through. Also please send me an email if parts you've bought recently, break or are faulty in some way, as I've held back some components to deal with this.

Many thanks to all of Dawn Robotics' customers over the last couple of years. It's been fun.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Tue Nov 17, 2015 8:08 pm

Welcome • Re: New User

2015-05-06T19:43:56+01:00

Hi there,

Welcome to the forums.

Looking forward to seeing how you get on. I haven't tried using Java on the Pi myself, apart from indirectly in the sense that the Arduino IDE is written in Java and unfortunately runs rather slowly. That was on the old Model B and B+ though. Hopefully with the increased grunt of the Pi 2 things should be better.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Wed May 06, 2015 7:43 pm

Welcome • New User

2015-05-06T12:00:02+01:00

Hi, I'm new to robotics and my main interest is in using Java SE (which can use the WebSocket interface) on the RPI. My first project will be to implement movement triggered wild life video capture. I've been using Java for a number of years and aim to re-use some of the wealth of pre-written Open Source software. I've recently dabbled with Python as part of a number of MOOCS I have done from MIT and intend to reimplement some code in Java to take advantage of the more sophisticated parallel programming facilities of the latter.

Statistics: Posted by poweruser — Wed May 06, 2015 12:00 pm

Welcome • Re: My first

2015-04-16T19:45:04+01:00

Hi there,

Welcome to the forums.

Glad to hear that you've got your robot up and running. Documentation is definitely an area that could do with improvement. Not sure how providing printed documentation would affect the cost of the kit, but it is our aim to collect the blog posts which currently describe the robot into a more complete manual.

Looking forward to seeing what you get up to with the robot.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Thu Apr 16, 2015 7:45 pm

Welcome • My first

2015-04-15T23:57:16+01:00

Hello to Dawn Robotics and the community.

Received the camera robot kit a few hours ago, just completed assembly, all is functioning as expected.

Just a couple of nitpicking points, I prefer my instructions printed on paper, while instructions were good for chassis assembly, I had to search online for wiring instructions, while easy to find, are not collated very well, example: the use of the power pack instead of batteries had me confused.

Also two of my web browsers on my galaxy tab 10.1 would not work, had to install Chrome which works perfectly, not seen information on this yet, though to be honest only just found your website, so I might not have seen this yet.

That's my nitpicking out of the way, all in all, the camera robot is now functioning as expected, looking forward to adding to this project, already ordered a 3.2 inch tft touch display to add direct access to the robots fuctions.

Really looking forward to see how far I can take this project, completely autonomous is certainly my goal.

Statistics: Posted by Puma — Wed Apr 15, 2015 11:57 pm

Welcome • Re: Security Cat minder robot

2014-12-26T23:59:30+01:00

Hi there,

Welcome to the forums.

Great to hear you got the robot working. Best of luck with your project plan, sounds like a cool idea and I'd love to hear how you get on and perhaps see some videos - cats and robots always work well on Youtube.

Hope your Christmas is going well, and Happy New Year.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Fri Dec 26, 2014 11:59 pm

Welcome • Security Cat minder robot

2014-12-26T09:54:27+01:00

Hi
Just successfully built the robot from the full kit. It worked first time. Brilliant.

I am going to try to get the robot as a security scanner to check house and cat when away.

Just retired and used to play with electronics 50 years ago. (transistors not valves)

Happy New Year

Statistics: Posted by Adeste — Fri Dec 26, 2014 9:54 am

Welcome • Re: Beginners Robotics Kit

2014-08-19T09:56:07+01:00

Hi Mike,

Welcome to the forums. It's not Pi or Scratch, but the Mirobot that was funded on Kickstarter is a nice looking starter robot that can be programmed with a graphical web environment that looks like it should be straightforward for someone who know Scratch.

Eventually, I'm hoping to get it so that our robot kit can be programmed with a Scratch like language called Blockly, but there's still a bit of work to be done before we can achieve that.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Tue Aug 19, 2014 9:56 am

Welcome • Beginners Robotics Kit

2014-08-18T21:19:51+01:00

Hi Folks,

I am looking for a robotics kit for my daughter, she is 12 years old and has Aspergers and is absolutely fixated on building a robot. She is great on computers and tablets devices so I figured a Raspberry PI based robot would be a good thing to keep this interest going. She is going to be learning Scratching Secondary School and so I am very keen to capitalise on this also.

Can anyone make a recommendation as I have found plenty of posts about the kits but not much information on the level at which they are targeted at and nothing concrete on if Scratch can be used.

I work in IT and so will be working on this project with her but I really need what ever she builds to work with scratch as this will be familiar to her.

Thanks in advance

Mike

Statistics: Posted by mikejh — Mon Aug 18, 2014 9:19 pm

Welcome • Re: Hello from lancashire

2014-02-28T08:56:39+01:00

Hi David,

Nice to meet you, and welcome to the forum.

We're always glad to help if you've got questions whilst building your robot, and please, share photos of your robot as you build.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Fri Feb 28, 2014 8:56 am

Welcome • Hello from lancashire

2014-02-27T20:46:28+01:00

Hi guys , and if there are any girls here .. hello to you

Just to say I really like the idea of the Pi Robot and will be buying some bits from your shop to attempt to make it.

I'm really glad you went to all the trouble of makeing a fully working rover for us to copy.
David

Statistics: Posted by Fivetide — Thu Feb 27, 2014 8:46 pm

Welcome • Re: Raspberry Pi Robot problems

2014-02-22T19:04:35+01:00

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the write up, and apologies for taking so long to approve this post. As I explained to another couple of posters, I've been very lax in checking the forum this week, and haven't yet worked out how to set up notifications when a post needs approval.

Glad to hear that you saw something on your laptop, but sorry to hear that it then seems to have flaked out again! How exactly are you connecting your laptop to the Pi? Is it through a router using a network cable?

If you've got some time to look at it again, are you able to run it off a mains power adapter to rule out power issues? Also, if you're able to ssh in, or to attach a keyboard and monitor, can you send the output of running ifconfig -a?

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Sat Feb 22, 2014 7:04 pm

Welcome • Re: Hello

2014-02-22T18:43:09+01:00

Hi Shane,

Glad to have you on board, and nice website, that's a cool range of RC projects you've got there.

Regards

Alan

Statistics: Posted by Alan — Sat Feb 22, 2014 6:43 pm

Welcome • Hello

2014-02-20T14:31:51+01:00

My names Shane.

I am a software engineer and have been programming in one form or another for around 15 years.

I like playing with RC electronics in my spare time.

I have built several RC cars over the last few years and like upgrading them with high performance electronics and parts.

I also fly single rotor helicopters and quad copters.

One of my current projects is a remote control hovercraft.

You can see some of my projects at http://kenjara.com

I have always had an interest in robotics and after coming across your website in a Linux magazine I decided to get involved.

Things I would like to be able to do with a robot.

Attach radio equipment to control it over 2.4ghz

Connect to it over wifi to remote control it as in one of the blog posts I have seen on here.

Intergrate the PI with the rover chassis.

At lights and sound to the robot to trigger on certain events.

Add an arm to the robot.

Thanks,

Shane

Statistics: Posted by kenjara — Thu Feb 20, 2014 2:31 pm

Welcome • Raspberry Pi Robot problems

2014-02-19T00:46:40+01:00

Hi Alan,

We met at the Cam Jam and I bought one of your Pi Robots. I built the robot in the Pi tradition of using what I had rather than buy another similar bits. So, the robot has a mk2 Pi, hand burned SD from the web site image, a Pi cam, WiPi dongle, GP Powerbank 4AH (to power the Pi) and the 4 x AA battery pack (for the motors). I plan to use a Nexus 7 for the hand controller and a Busbi 7 as a cheap backup.

The build was straight forward and the instructions clear.

At power on, the robot twitched and the Pi lights winked but the Nexus didn't pick up the Pi. Or the second or third time. Shuffled the driver board about and pluged in a monitor to see what was going on. During boot, this line appeared which seemed to be germain to the situation:

Starting advanced IEEE 802.11 management: hostapdioctl[siocswmode]: invalid argument
Failed

You were very helpful and quick with your reply to my query, thanks

"I believe that replacing the driver line with driver=nl80211 in you /etc/hostapd/hostapd.conf should work. If it doesn't then you may need to remove the patched version of AdaFruit's hostapd (see their tutorial for an explanation). This is done by running the following from the Pi command line

sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd /usr/sbin/hostapd.ADA
sudo mv /usr/sbin/hostapd.ORIG /usr/sbin/hostapd "

As it turned out both were required before the Nexus picked up the Pi.

After many attempts involving repowering the robot, the Nexus eventually got an IP address and keying in the server IP (I suppose) into the nexus, got a rather short lived (5 seconds) poor quality video feed from the robot but no controlling joysticks. Further attempts failed to collect an IP address.

As there is no way to close down the Pi cleanly, I was pulling the power to shut down which had the effect of corrupting the SD card about half the time. Ended up with two cards on the go, one in use, the other being reburned.

Using a Maplin USB plug, I made up a short, direct power line between the Pi and the Powerbank. SD card corruption seems to have stopped. I think that a lot of the USB to micro USB leads were not designed to take the current that a Pi takes and so loose vital volts along their length leading to weirdies at the Pi.

I tried using the Busbi and it had more success in getting an IP address but only just. Didn't get a video feed but was able to pan and tilt the camera from the right joystick. But only the once but nothing crashed so I played with it for a while.

Both tablets said that the signal strength was excellent but were constantly trying to obtain an IP address and failing. The information provided by the tablets is a bit sparse for trouble shooting so I fired up my windows 7 laptop which I hoped would give more clues.

The first try came up with an invalid IP address format but the second attempt got through and, using Chrome, gave video feed and both joysticks functioning using the mousepad and left key to drive the joysyicks.

Pan and tilt tested OK, motor drive right, left tested OK.

However, it seems that this, too, was a once only function. No success since. And the tablets still don't pick up an IP address. Next, I'll try it with the notebook.

Andrew

Statistics: Posted by ayoungtech — Wed Feb 19, 2014 12:46 am