Ananthan's Blog

I have been thinking of creating a small mobile robot from scratch. From scratch means, go through all the steps of a product development. Design the overall architecture, design the circuits, make 3D model of the parts, 3D print the parts and finally integrate with ROS. The methods I followed may not be the best practice. The only aim is to reach from idea to actual product (prototype). Features: 4 Wheel Differential Drive Camera WiFi IMU GPS(optional) Overview A 4 wheeled differential mobile robot with wheel encoders, camera, WiFi, IMU and GPS(optional). The first thing I did was to come up with an overall architecture. Raspberry pi 3 will be the heart of the robot. Pi Zero was considered in the beginning, but eventually had to  change because of the lack of support for ROS. Even though able to compile ROS from scratch, it became so hard to compile other packages needed for the project. Since I do not want to use pi to directly control motors, I had to desig...

For some time I was thinking of making a simple clap switch for my room. ( Kind of lazy to go and switch off the light and fan every time... :-) ) First get it work on a breadboard. "Circuit is simple and straight way. Feed the output from the mic to a comparator. The output of comparator will act as the trigger for micro-controller. Micro-controller detects the pattern and enable the corresponding relay switch. Micro-controller always waits for an interrupt (a clap). If a clap is detected it will wait and counts the following claps within a period of 1s. It will discard miss claps and only takes into account the pattern that is programmed. 2 claps means light on/off & 3 claps means fan on/off. There will be separate switch to enable/disable the clap circuit and precedence will be given for the physical switch. That means if the physical switch is on regardless of the relay state light/fan will be ON. If it's not then it will depend on the clap circuit." Co...