@fish-in-a-puddle

Finally, the Lunar Rover model can be built! After waiting a while for the motors to arrive, I built a cardboard frame as a prototype and 3d printed some wheels to get the rover rolling. So far it only runs a test sketch to go forwards, backwards and turn a bit (which really freaked my dog), but next I’m going to have it navigate on its own using an ultrasonic sensor. Then I’ll add some of the extra features, like Bluetooth control, headlights that turn on when it’s dark and a servo to make the receiver dish sweep from side to side. I do realize that at the moment this guy looks absolutely nothing like the actual lunar rover, but I will be modeling a 3d printed chassis and painting it to look like the real thing. Plus, I’m going to add two little astronauts in the seats, because this was not an autonmous vehicle. It was similar to a space golf cart and by god I will do it justice.

I have some good news and some bad news here for you today. The good news: I found the problems! The motor driver needed a common ground ( wasn’t broken, I’m just stupid) and the ir remote library is interfering with the servo library, as they are both trying to use the same timer on the Arduino. I don’t really have any time logged for this since furious forum searching doesn’t count towards Stardust, but I can promise you that after two hours of checking docs and datasheets, as well as running a test that took like ten minutes, I’ve nailed down the issue. The bad news: there isn’t really a way to actually fix it, only to get around it. I could use a second Arduino to receive the values and send them over serial for the main board to use, but I’m not loving the idea of sacrificing another board to this project. I need the two working Nanos I have for other projects. Our other option is to abandon the ir receiver altogether and use Bluetooth instead, which is fine but will require a steep learning curve, as I have no idea how to make an app. MIT App Inventor, here I come I guess. Since my partner in crime is still at camp until next Sunday, I won’t be able to make a decision, so I guess this is it for now. More on the amazing adventures of R2-D2 will be shared when we have something to share.

Started working on a personal website! So far I have a vague idea of how it should look and am slowly making it happen. There’s a header with a welcome message, an “about me” section and a section at the bottom with links to my Stardance and github. I’m playing around with flex to get everything in the right place, but it’s pretty ugly right now. I’ll make everything look more put together once everything’s actually there.

Folks, it’s not looking great. I think that the irRemote library that I’m using is using the same timer as the servo library, so I made a test sketch without remote control. The servo and sound work great in that sketch, but the motor still won’t turn on. I’ve tried using another motor driver and changing my power supply, but the thing won’t turn on. The motor itself isn’t busted - I checked - but there’s something going on. Over the next few days, I’ll do some more in-depth debugging for that, and try to reintegrate the remote control. My sister is going to camp for the next two weeks, though, so once I make the remote control work I’ll leave it alone until she gets back.

Big day- soldered a switch onto one of the battery connectors for this project and two for another, laid down for two hours to recover from fume headache, made a circuit diagram for the project and tried to fit everything on the internal frame in a slightly different way. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to record a timelapse while soldering because I was at the library to use their soldering iron. But it went pretty well! Over the next few days I’ll keep looking into solutions for our remote problem so hopefully we’ll be ready for our first ship soon.

We’ve hit a bit of a wall with the remote control code. At first, the tester code worked fine - the LEDs turned on and off with the push of a button. But when it came to the gate controlling the motor, it would turn on, but never off. I thought that this was a problem with the gate, as I’ve run into something similar with another project, so we borrowed a motor driver from the robotics club supplies and hooked it up. Now, though, the damn thing won’t even start. It will take one command from the remote - turn the steering servo. Then it won’t do anything else. I don’t know exactly what’s wrong, but I’m going to check out some other documentation and tutorials that might have answers. In other news, my sister now has a Stardance account: @Winter314. She’s awaiting verification, but after that there will be some updates from her too. Too bad two people can’t share a project - that would make things easier because I don’t know exactly how we’re going to ship this.

R2-D2 is coming along nicely! It’s a joint project between my sister and I, but she doesn’t know much about coding and hasn’t signed up for Stardance, so it’s all on my account. The chassis of the robot is from a kit we had when we were in elementary school, but support for the original app was discontinued a few years ago. We’re reviving it with an Arduino Uno, the original motor (which is fixed to the internal frame and wheels), a replacement servo motor to steer the robot, an IR receiver so it can be remote controlled, some LEDs and a buzzer. I found an R2-D2 sound generator for Arduino that I tested and it sounds just like the droid. We’ve divided the project into a few phases: First, get the remote control working with the internal frame and have a functional (if ugly) little robot. Then, make it possible for R2 to roll around on his own with an ultrasonic sensor to navigate. After getting both modes working, we’ll put the internal and external frames together, which will involve a lot of problem-solving. We’ll ship the project after each phase, mainly to keep it organized. So far, we are well on our way through phase 1. I’ve put all the components on the internal frame and written a test sketch for them. My sister also put the decals that came with the kit on the external frame. The next step is to log the remote control values and have R2 know what to do when he receives the values.

I fixed one of my problems today by replacing the video with a gif, a caption and a sound that plays when the gif is clicked. If ya can’t make it work, just don’t make it worse. Windows still not opening or closing despite several tweaks (except the welcome window, my only ally). Won’t be able to do any more work today because it’s Canada Day and I have family stuff, but I have a plan for tomorrow.

These close buttons are fighting me every step of the way. The open buttons too. I changed the way that the windows are hidden by checking and changing the class of the window elements and went through all the IDs and variables in case the problem was in finding the right element. It still doesn’t work. The welcome screen is still working fine with this change and unlike all the other windows has been able to close this whole time. At this point, I’m out of ideas on how to fix this. Maybe I’ll go hunting through forums again (too bad that doesn’t count towards Stardust, because I seem to be doing a lot of it lately). In regards to the other features, the video is still not working, but I have a gif of the scene that I could add instead and just put captions underneath. As I got a bit sidetracked with my window problem, I never actually finished making the notes app. I’m planning to save that until later this week. The clicker game, thankfully, is still complete and nothing has broken. It isn’t a great game, but it’s there, which is more than I can say for everything else. If all goes according to plan, I’m hoping to ship this one at the end of the week.

Over the past couple of days, I have been working on a few things: the clicker game, having a video play in a window, and (most important and difficult) getting the windows to open and close. I have had success with one out of three of these tasks. The game was a lot easier than I expected - it just needed a variable that could increase when the image is clicked. The video seemed easy, but ended up being very stubborn. It will only play if it’s put in picture-in-picture mode, but I do have some hope for fixing it. The windows, though, will kill me. I think I just need to make a copy to mess around with and keep a decent version safe.

Well, the whole ‘tomorrow’ thing turned out to be a lie. Over the past couple of days, I tried to make a window for the notes app (worked), make it possible to select the notes app icon (worked), move the notes window (worked), open and close the notes window (didn’t work), add more icons to the screen (worked), make it possible to select those icons (didn’t work) and make a custom cursor (didn’t work). Most of the time was spent undoing the damage from trying to fix new bugs. It reminded me of a book I just read about the Apollo missions. The book said that the engineering motto of the team was “if you can’t fix the problem, do as little as possible to avoid making it worse”. They may have had a point. My next steps for this project will be to make it possible to select the app icons and to open and close the windows for the apps. If I can make that happen, I’ll move on to making the actual content of the apps and at the end I’ll circle back to the custom cursor.

Today I rewired the display and other components (which I wired wrong the first time) and tested the code I had modified. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. I thought the problem was the display (since the screen just flickered) so I found a tutorial to just show a heart icon on the screen. Watched it, coded it in Arduino IDE and put it on the board. The display worked fine, except for a few rows which were very dim because I used too high a resistor. After I fixed that, I tried a few other small fixes, but no dice. I think that I’ll try to find a decent tutorial using a different kind of LED matrix and try to modify that instead.

I wired the LED matrix and and joystick in about 30 or 45 minutes, but my phone died while I was recording the timelapse. Very sad. ;-; But I did find some code that will work with this particular LED matrix, which is not i2c or serial or anything unlike most of the tutorials. This code did not have a tutorial, so I copied it over and started modifying it. It took a while to find a decent wiring chart to match the code to the wiring, but I got everything sorted out in a little bit. Kinda sad that most of the time I put in didn’t get recorded, but oh well. Tonight I’m going to keep working on the code and tomorrow I’ll try to rewire the components (this time AFTER charging my phone).

Today I added the handle and close button to the welcome window. When the close button is clicked, a bubble popping sound is played. The close button is also a dead fish. The one thing I couldn’t get to work was the open window button, and I don’t have any ideas for why it isn’t working. Google also doesn’t seem to know, but I think that’s ok, because I wanted the welcome screen to only show once anyway. Next I’ll be doing the style sheet, and then hopefully the first app will be partially completed by the end of tomorrow.

Woah, did some Javascript for the first time…. scary…. Anyways, got the top bar working a lot better with displaying the actual time, not whatever time I put in the placeholder. Also, I added a sound effect for when the os logo is clicked (bubbles!!). I’m starting to get the hang of HTML and CSS I think, so I’m hoping to add a little more customization soon. Has anyone watched The Amazing Digital Circus? If so, you know which fish I’m hoping to incorporate into a “finances” app in the next couple of days.

Hooray! Made a bunch of progress with my webOS, including:

• Finishing the boot screen
• Adding a (lovely) moving background
• Started work on the top bar, which I’ll probably finish tomorrow evening
  I also added the Github repository to the project info. My immediate to-do list now includes:
• Finish the top bar
• Figure out how to add the sound effect for the mouse (which I suspect will be a challenge)
  Super happy with how this is going!

Very clumsily made my way through making the boot screen (or at least a first draft of the boot screen) with my nonexistent HTML and CSS skills. I am…. learning so much. It took a while to figure out how to access an image from the folder, but I got it eventually. Also, I added a cool font I found. I’ll probably change it later because it doesn’t really fit the style, but it’s fine for now. Next I’m going to try to set the background to some kind of gif or video (not sure how/if it’s possible so might not work) to make the background look like the bottom of a pond. Another idea I had (no idea how to do this either) is for a bubble sound to play when you click anywhere. I’ll try to get the boot screen done tomorrow, then off to the next step! (Btw I hope you all appreciate my artistic talent)