Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Wow, It's Slow!

Not much cool robotics stuff showing up in the last week.  Hopefully that means that you are all building away with your new presents that you got for the holidays!  I know I have been building lots lately.

I have been keeping my eyes on what is coming out of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show), but there really isn't a lot on that front either.

I am still working on the Quad-Flexpicker.  Things are going great and I am learning a lot.  I got the Mindsensors NXTcam and I am trying to incorporate that.  I am also teaching myself PID programming, which is a whole task in itself.  I studied PID controllers in college, but that was back last century, and it was exclusively the in the theoretical realm and I NEVER imagined that I would use that knowledge again, much less use it in my hobby in my spare time.

2 comments:

  1. PID is easy to program, its just the tuning that is so incredibly tedious, It can be worth automating the trialling in some way...

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  2. Parax, you are right, programming was easy thanks to the Hispabrick tutorial. Turns out, I only need a "P" controller, and that does plenty good enough.

    Last time I did work on PIDs, I was deep into Mech. Engineering, so all the work we did was on paper or on a computer, so I didn't really get a true taste for it. I remember is was Calculus heavy, which didn't bother me at the time, but those skills are extremely rusty now. I was pretty intimidated by it at first until I read Hispabrick, and it brought it all back.

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