Ananthan's Blog

Bored of having the same boot animation screen again and again? There are plenty of Plymouth themes available out there. This is a theme I created by slicing some cool gif files I found online. You can download the theme and find the installation steps on my github account. ( https://github.com/krishnan793/PlymouthTheme-Cat )  The theme is created for Ubuntu 16.04. But this can be installed on previous versions with slight modification. If you have a slow computer then you can watch the whole animation loops. (The VM I used to record the screen was fast though. :))

I am working on a small self balancing robot for couple of days. It is not completed yet. To minimise the cost I used breadboard itself as a frame instead of a wooden or an acrylic one. 1 x Breadboard (small) 1 x Arduino pro mini 1 x IMU MPU 6050 1 x Motor driver 1x Powerbank (TP Link) 2 x DC Motor Things done Get raw data of IMU Get pitch,roll and yaw Control DC Motors from arduino Thing that need to be done Implement PID Tune Kp,Ki, and Kd.

This is a project I had completed while doing internship at EY. The idea is to automate inventory and the stock checking process without any human intervention. Today these are all done using human resource. This is a really tiresome work because it involves manually inspecting each pallet (box) and read the QR/Bar code associated with it.  Instead consider a swarm of drones (a dozen or a hundred drones) go and check each pallet and complete the whole inventory and stock checking process in just a few minutes. This is a proof of concept design in which a drone uses a blueprint to travel a particular path and then reads and analyse each stock item and update it in the warehouse management system. All these things are done in real time. The drone used here is Parrot bebop and is implemented in ROS. Instead of actual boxes, QR code is fixed to symbolise each palette. The ROS implementation makes the project scalable. The video of the project is shown below.

Parrot Bebop drone is much stable while comparing with the most widely used AR Drone. Due to ROS support  and its open API AR Drone was widely used in the research community. Autonomy Lab had released the Bebop driver for ROS support and am planning to do some fun projects with it. This video is showing bebop taking off and landing where the commands are send from ROS. Bebop is fun to work with but flight time of just 10 min is really annoying (Bebop 2 has twice the battery life but doesn't have one to try out).

If you are a geek, then you definitely want to mess with everything to create something cool out of it. What about controlling all of your appliances from your computer or from your smart phone wirelessly? Set timer for light when you go to sleep; autonomously switch your fan on when temperature exceeds; and when you are too lazy to get up from your bed to switch fan/light off. All you need is an ESP8266 with a couple of other components that cost <10$. Kind of lazy to always go and switch OFF the lights/Fans especially when sleepy :-). So 3 days straight and it's done... 2 days is spend to understand and change the firmware of WiFi chip ESP 8266. (You can add an extra micro controller along with ESP 8266, but what's the fun in it? ) Made ESP 8266 ES01 chip to act as a TCP server and also to control the Relay circuit (Changed the firmware and programmed it). Control messages are interpreted and necessary signals are passed to the Relay circuit. AC to DC converte...

ESP8266 is a cheap WiFi chip you can use in your embedded projects. You can communicate the chip using AT commands through UART. You can setup a WiFi hotspot, connect to an existing WiFi network, act as a web server, send data (TCP/UDP). The real fun is that you can reprogram the whole chip and you don't need an other micro controller to control it. The ESP8266 ES1 come with 2 GPIO pins. There are other variants of this chip with more GPIO. This ESP 01 cost around Rs. 250 which is so cheap while comparing with other WiFi modules. One thing to remember is that the device is 3.3 V logic. Do not connect 5V supply or 5V RX/TX pins to the device. Connection ======== VCC       ->       3.3V GND       ->       GND CH_PD   ->       3.3V RX          ->       TX TX          ->       RX If you a...

The drone is able to search and find the landing platform. Once it finds the landing platform it will try to orient itself and land in the platform. Both of these are implemented using Neural Network. The tag used in the landing platform is from the ros package ar_track_alvar.