Robotics on Michael Doornbos

First "REAL" 3D Maps with my 3DRobotics Solo

Thu, 10 Mar 2016 19:23:51 +0000

Switching gears lately in my other life to work with Blueridge Forestry on a mapping workflow for them. Making this map of a local closed landfill turned model airplane field really was a snap.

Docker images for Dronekit

Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:28:30 +0000

Started on a new project this evening. Docker images for Dronekit and some tools for automating flights. Love me some Docker!

I've always been an instigator

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 16:23:06 +0000

In an email exchange this morning a friend of mind called me an instigator who uses “science” as an excuse for it.

Yeah, this is not a new thing. Here’s some evidence from 2011…

[youtube=://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fn_AwvQ3K1Q&w=854&h=480]

I wonder how long it took them to clean up the flour…

Experimentation Platform for UAS Systems with CHIP

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 19:45:45 +0000

I’m a longtime user of Raspberry PI in my day job and I like it a lot, but I’m going to try the just announced C.H.I.P. System to standardize new products on for UAS work.

I just ordered 3 for a whopping $27 :-)

Intel Galileo Time! Woot!

Tue, 18 Feb 2014 20:44:03 +0000

Infrared Sensor Data for Hal

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:01:31 +0000

I’m using an infrared range sensor for the real life Hal. The Sharp GP2Y0A02YK0F - Infrared Proximity Sensor Long Range -

[caption id=“attachment_498” align=“alignnone” width=“300” caption=“Hal 1.0”][/caption]

While testing his motions, I was noticing some pretty erratic behavior, so I decided to collect some data on the sensor values on a fixed object, while Hal was not moving.

This is a graph of about a minute of Hal moving the sensor from 45 to 135 degress in front of him and then taking a reading when the motion of the sensor stops. It’s at a wall, at a slight angle so the graph lines aren’t on top of each other at about 45 centimeters away.

Power to electric motors from a digital controller is never easy

Thu, 07 May 2009 00:20:56 +0000

Hooking up 2 electric drive motors seems like a simple task on the surface, but never is in practice. Here’s my mockup of a circuit I’m going to use. The meat of the control circuit is an L293D Quadruple Half-H Driver. Now that the breadboard prototype is working, it’s time to assemble the thing permanently on a printed circuit board. Leave a comment if you want the schematic for this, it works pretty well with no noticeable gitter thanks to a bunch of capacitors.

It's time to make the robots

Tue, 05 May 2009 10:31:23 +0000

I’m building a small robot this week. We’re calling him Evadotbot (Caleb came up with that).

He’s pretty simple, a two motor gearbox will control 2 wheels, the 3rd being a caster wheel so he can spin in a circle. He’s controlled by a simple motor controller chip and powered by 4 AA rechargeable batteries.

His “brain” is an Ardunino Duemilanove which has a whopping 32k of memory. If you’re not a computer geek, think about that Commodore 64 you could get in 1981 and divide it’s RAM in half. Or, go to the It’s shown here in it’s “skull”, aka an Altoids mint box.