Slow streaming and flipped joystick

[Lt904]

Hello, I am having trouble with my Pi robot kit, I put together the bot and am running off a preloaded SD card, however when I log in to the robot to control it, I find he streaming is slow and jumpy and the control stick for the wheels is on it's side, i.e. when I move it forward on the stick, the bot turns right, when I move the stick to the right, the bot moves forwards!

Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

[Alan]

Hello there,

Welcome to the forum.

I'm not sure about the slow video. Images should come through at about 15 frames per second, which is not the quickest, but you should be able to drive around, and see your hand waving in front of the camera without very much of a delay.

With regards to the joystick problem it sounds like you have one or both of your motors wired the wrong way. To correct this, could you please prop the robot up using a couple of books or something and then push forward on the joystick. Both motors should go forward, if one motor goes backwards, then you need to reverse the wires for that motor. It may also be worth checking that the left motor is wired to ML and the right motor is wired to the pins marked MR. It's really easy to get wires crossed over after threading them through holes in the chassis.

Hope that helps.

Regards

Alan

[Lt904]

Hello,

Thanks for the quick reply, I have managed to sort out the flipped joystick issue and now the bot moves as expected, however the camera images still stream extremely slowly, especially when the bot is moving, making it impossible to drive by camera. The camera image seems to lag when any movement is taking place, and then after the bot or pan tilt head stops moving it takes a few moments for the camera image to catch up.

Any advice would be appreciated, all in all the bot is fantastic and a great little kit, unfortunately at present I am not able to move and see the camera properly at the same time.

[Alan]

Hi there,

What type of Pi do you have? Also how are you powering the Pi and do you have any extra USB devices plugged in?

Not sure really what could be causing this, are you in a noisy WiFi environment? i.e. lots of other routers around? One thing to try might be to temporarily connect the robot to a router or PC using an ethernet cable and see if streaming via a network cable improves things.

Regards

Alan

[Lt904]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your input, after some playing around I have discovered that the Pi robot is only acting slowly on my iPad, on a comparable (hardware wise) android tablet the bot drives smoothly and easily and the web interface acts as expected.

After discovering this I then tested the bot on a range of different browsers on two "big" iPads, an iPad mini, two iphones, a brand new windows 8.1 laptop, a Mac mini, an iMac and two android tablets and I found the only really usable performance was to be found on the android tablets. In fact, on the windows laptop I couldn't see the camera image being streamed back to me.

I'm happy with the bot, the kit and support I have received from you. I am happy to use my android tablet to play around with the bot. Just thought this might be useful infor for you.


Thanks again,
Tom

[Lt904]

Hi there,

What type of Pi do you have? Also how are you powering the Pi and do you have any extra USB devices plugged in?

Not sure really what could be causing this, are you in a noisy WiFi environment? i.e. lots of other routers around? One thing to try might be to temporarily connect the robot to a router or PC using an ethernet cable and see if streaming via a network cable improves things.

Regards

Alan

FYI, I have the raspberry Pi model B, powering it with the tecknet USB power bank. I tried the steps you suggested before trying different devices.

[Alan]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for this. This is very helpful, especially as at the moment I only really have access to a PC and android tablets for testing. Saving up for the ipad...

What browser are you using on the ipad? I have had conflicting reports in the past saying that Safari does and doesn't work (hopefully newer versions are better...). However, people have reported good performance with the Chrome and Firefox browsers. Essentially the web interface uses HTML5, and Chrome and Firefox seem to have the best support for HTML5. On Windows, I think that internet explorer is pretty much a loss at the moment due to HTML5 incompatibilities, but Firefox or Chrome should work well.

Regards

Alan

[beppeIT]

I support what is reported,

using chrome is the best solution both on PC/MAC/Ipad (i tested on all 3).
you get fastest response and frame rate.

Beppe

[drx]

Had similar problems on my iphone 6 (tried safari and chrome) works but sluggish. however works fantastic from my android nexus tablet running chrome