Crazyflie and Rowley hack for control via STM32-103STK

via Rowley Associates blog

Paul Curtis was playing with Crazyflie Quadcopter, but he didn’t like the PC based controlling solution, so he made one himself using STM32-103STK and Wii controller. He posted his sources on the blog page above. Good work 🙂

Amazing project with SHIELD-EKG-EMG

Gustavo Brancante posted on our forum this amazing project https://www.olimex.com/forum/index.php?topic=1496.0
He is controlling mechanical hand with signals received from his own ARM and sensed with our SHIELD-EKG-EMG https://www.olimex.com/Products/Duino/Shields/SHIELD-EKG-EMG/
The project is open source and Gustavo is looking for collaborators, the code is posted at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/inmoov/vI1sG6WvnQc

AVR-T32U4 Arduino Leonardo Analog Servo motor drive demo

We stock now 6 types of Analog Servo drive motors https://www.olimex.com/Products/RobotParts/ServoMotors/

The motor parameters are encoded in their names:

MS-1.3-9 means – Servo-Motor with 1.3 kg.cm force and 9 gram weight.
MS-R-1.3-9 means Servo-Motor with 360 degree angle and 1.3 kg.cm force and 9 gram weight.

All servo motors came with various exchangable plastic arms:

Separately are available aluminum ARMs which can snap to the bigger 3.2 kg.cm and 6 kg.cm motors, these are so powerful than can open and close drawers.

Adruino have special library for servo drive just notice that the normal servos will accept angle between 0 and 120 degree only, while the R type will accept from 0 to 360 degree.

The demo code is on GitHub: https://github.com/OLIMEX/DUINO/tree/master/AVR/SERVO

You can see the code running on this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdH7dr4Aa30

A10S-OLinuXino ANDROID GPIO control LED toggle app

We got lot of requests on our forum how to control GPIOs from Android.

With the new A10S Android image we decided to play a bit and it appear to be not hard to implement.

We found two ways to do GPIO control running Android.

GPIO using ADB

1. Boot android (from nand or sdcard)

2. Connect USB-to-Serial cable on UART1

3. Open terminal at speed 115200

4. When loading is ready in the terminal type “sh” and enter

5. “ls /sys/class/gpio_sw” will give you a list of all accessable GPIOs.

The GPIOs name is according to the chip ports. For example PE3 is LED1.

6. To set PE3 as output:

#echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio_sw/PE3/mul_sel

or as input

#echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio_sw/PE3/mul_sel

7. To turn on LED:

#echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio_sw/PE3/data

and to turn off:

#echo 0 > /sys/class/gpio_sw/PE3/data

8. If GPIO is as input to read state:

#cat /sys/class/gpio_sw/PE3/data

GPIO using Android SDK

Basicly you should read and write to the filesys. Make sure that your app is running as root, or else nothing will happen.

The demo program toggle LED1 on every button press.  The sources are at GitHub: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/SOFTWARE/A10S/A10S-ANDROID-GPIO

All read/write methods are realized in GPIO.java file.

The application is with single button and each time you press it it toggles the green LED on the board.

You can see ToggleLED.apk running at this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kTUkJx2TgQ

AVR-T32U4 Arduino demo code for TV remote control

AVR-T32U4 is easiest way to breadboard your Arduino projects, with this demo we will show you how to connect MOD-IRDA and receive and send IR commands from TV remote control and to TV.

MOD-IRDA have IR receiver and IR LED, in the demo project we will use Jumper wires to connect to Breadboard.

The demo code is at https://github.com/OLIMEX/DUINO/tree/master/AVR/IR-REMOTE

LED is connected to D13 and MOD-IRDA IR receiver is connected to D11.

On the video you can see how LED is switched ON and OFF with ‘1’ and ‘2’ buttons from the IR remote.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Asbb1Jr1DNs

The same way you can control other stuff with Arduino, for instance connecting Servo motor to move your fences at home etc.

SCRATCH control for MOD-IO

Controlling Relays, Switching ON/OFF of 220V appliances and home automation is possible now with Scratch + MOD-IO.

1. Install python-smbus:

#apt-get install python-smbus
2. Install scratchpy

#git clone https://github.com/pilliq/scratchpy.git
#cd scratchpy
#make install

3. Run SCRATCH and open MOD-IO.sb

4. Go to ‘Sensing’. Right click ‘… sensor value’ hit: ‘Enable
remote sensor connections’ (if it not enabled).

5. Run terminal and start the python script
#python IO.py -a 0x58 -i 2 --host=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx --port=xxxx --verbose
-i - I2C bus that you're using
-a - Address of MOD-IO (default 0x58)
--host - IP if you're connecting remote computer
--port - Port number
--verbose - Print some debug information.
For example:
#python IO.py -a 0x58 -i 2 --verbose --host=192.168.0.100 --port=40000

You should see message that the program is connected.

6. Run the Scratch block

7. Press ‘1’, ‘2’, ‘3’ or ‘4’ to toggle relays

the project is uploaded on GitHub: https://github.com/OLIMEX/OLINUXINO/tree/master/SOFTWARE/A13/A13%2BSCRATCH%2BMOD-IO

A13-OLinuXino serving MOD-RGB and WEB-CAM for live stream

In the previous post I wrote how A13-OLinuXino runs Apache server and you can control MOD-RGB strip over the internet, now the A13-OLinuXino service is available online at : http://94.156.100.85:8081/RGB/ you can open this URL and see actually web pages served by A13-OLinuXino

What’s new Dimitar Gmishev did is to connect USB web camera to A13-OLinuXino too, so now you can see the RGB stripe response to the web cntrol.

To see the MOD-RGB stripe via the web cam you need video player – in our case this is open source Kantaris player with Ctrl-B you force it to play stream from internet URL and point it to : http://94.156.100.85:8080 and you will see the web cam video stream, so when you change the RGB color control you see the result on the camera!

Have fun and try it yourself

A13-OLinuXino web server with MOD-RGB controlling RGB LED stripe over internet

A13-OLinuXino have enough power to run real apache web server with php5, java script etc like any desktop linux computer.

With MOD-RGB connected to A13-OLinuXino UEXT you can control RGB LED stripe up to 5A per channel over fancy web interface from any device with web browser like your tablet or phone.

For instance you can make cool RGB LED lighting in your home and to control then with your phone, A13-OLinuXino can connect to many different MOD-RGB controllers as they are addressable, so you can connect many LED stripes to A13-OLinuXino web server and to controll them separately.

These are step by step instructions how to duplicate yourself:

Prepare A13-OLinuXino-WIFI for web serving:

Update repository
$apt-get update

Install apache and php
$apt-get install apache2 php5 libapache2-mod-php5

Open browser and type A13 board internal network IP address. For instance http://192.168.0.30 . You should get message “It Works”

Extract demo files into apache dir. For example /var/www/RGB

Compile i2c-tool
$gcc i2c-tool

Make executable
$chmod 777 a.out

Change permitions of i2c-bus
$chmod 777 /dev/i2c*

Now open index.html. You should see color picker. Move mouse. Enjoy 🙂

FRIDAY FREE BOARD QUIZ ISSUE #28 IS MOD-RGB

MOD-RGB is our new 3 channel RGB LED controller. Each channel can control 12V 5A LEDs so it’s suitable to control high power LEDs and RGB LED stripes.

MOD-RGB directly connects to UEXT on A13-OLinuXino, iMX233-OLinuXino, OLIMEXINO-328 Ardino like, DUINOMITE(-MINI-MEGA-eMEGA), PINGUINO, OLIMEXINO-STM32(MAPLE) and we have demo codes for all these boards. With the help of RPI-UEXT it can be connected to Raspberry Pi also or Stellaris launchpad via STELLARIS-UEXT.

On top of I2C RGB control you can use MOD-RGB as Disco Light controller when you feed Audio singal to the audio connector the R, G and B channel will blink with the low-mid-high frequencies beat.

There is provision MOD-RGB to become DMX controller with MOD-RS485 connected to the UEXT connector, but the firmware is not complete to support DMX yet.

Today at 17.00 o’clock our local Bulgarian time (GMT+2) we will post on Twitter our questions.

You have one hour to reply to our tweet with the correct answer.

At 18.00 o’clock we will count the correct answers and ask random.org to generate random number in range then announce the winner and ship the board by airmail in Monday.

Good Luck!

RFID logger with Web server interface made with iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI and MOD-RFID125

MOD-RFID125 and MOD-RFID1356 are USB RFID readers for 125Khz and 13.56Mhz RFID tags. They both support keyboard emulation mode and CDC Serial port communication mode and can be used with iMX233-OLinuXino-MAXI.

The project on GitHub creates RFID logger which logs when user approach with it tag and is controlled via web interface.

You should download the project from GitHub and build it then add rfid.php  to your web server directory.