Thoughtophone

I've moved on to a multi-ratio gearbox which consists of 2 plastic L-Shape brackets with some appropriately spaced holes in them. It comes with a motor, but I've replaced it with an MM28, which has several times the torque and power. This means using a configuration not really anything like the manufacturer intended. I'm not sure the plastic is quite up to the job, and the geometry leaves me with a few problems. I'm already considering building my own brackets out of aluminium. That would be a good use of my drill press, finally. Anyway, I think I should figure out a prototype using the off the shelf parts for now, so plastic will do. I've wired all this together, and adjusted the software, because the board is oriented differently. The result is erratic, to say the least. So I've updated my software, so that it aggregates statistics from the balancer loop, and writes them to a serial port. I've connected a serial bluetooth adapter to that, so I can have

I've bought a laptop to replace my desktop, and installed Ubuntu 13.10, Saucy Salamander. A down side of upgrading from 13.04 is that this PPA  doesn't support saucy yet. No matter: I can build from source. Start by adding the PPA, which will create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/terry_guo-gcc-arm-embedded-saucy.list Edit this file: uncomment the deb-src entry, and replace saucy with raring. It'll look like this: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/terry.guo/gcc-arm-embedded/ubuntu raring main deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/terry.guo/gcc-arm-embedded/ubuntu raring main Now: $ sudo apt-get install apt-src $ sudo apt-src install gcc-arm-none-eabi unfortunately, this won't quite work. You will need to downgrade texinfo before it will build. $ sudo apt-get remove texinfo $ wget http://launchpadlibrarian.net/125194117/texinfo_4.13a.dfsg.1-10ubuntu4_amd64.deb $ dpgk -i texinfo_4.13a.dfsg.1-10ubuntu4_amd64.deb Now build: $ cd gcc-arm-none-eabi-4-8-2013q4 $ fakeroot .

I forgot to actually say that the electric gerbil fell by the wayside. Basically I couldn't find a strong enough gerbil ball, and re-enforcing one was going to be quite complicated. I also found that creating a convenient way of opening and closing the ball was a lot of trouble. All of this should be soluble, but I'd rather build something that doesn't require a whole lot of mechanical engineering. I want to get better at that, but I don't want it too prove too great an obstacle in my first project. I've now cobbled together a balancing robot prototype using the same motors, and the STM32F3 discovery I mentioned before. I've also written some balancing software, which seems to work roughly as described. Not that the robot balances... The guides I have read suggest just use the proportional part of PID, and get that working, and then work on the oscillation, but pretty much however high I set the constant, my robot falls flat on it's face. It's hard t