Surveyor Robotics Journal

Surveyor Robotics Journal

	email: support@surveyor.com SRV-1 home page Surveyor Corporation home page Subscribe to a syndicated RSS feed. Archives June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006 August 2006 July 2006 June 2006 May 2006 April 2006 March 2006 Februray 2006 January 2006	Fri, 18 Jul 2008 Robot Magazine interested in SRV-1 Blackfin university users Tom Atwood, Editor-in-Chief of Robot Magazine, is interested in talking with university instructors, researchers and students who are working with SRV-1 Blackfin robots and controllers to feature their work in the magazine's "Robot Spotlight" section. If you would like to participate, please send an email to support@surveyor.com with your contact information and a brief description of your SRV-1 Blackfin usage. Your submission doesn't have to be limited to university applications, as other uses might catch their interest, but this seems to be their primary focus. Posted Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:43 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Mon, 14 Jul 2008 First frames from prototype SRV-1 Blackfin Stereo Camera left right Prototype boards just arrived and first tests were successful, with both cameras transmitting through the shared Matchport (simultaneous feeds shown above in left and right windows). We still need to test the servo or h-bridge interfaces, but the voltages look good. Only issue is that we have to manually reset both processors after power-up - most likely issue is a collision on the SPI channels as both Blackfins simultaneously boot from SPI flash. Not certain yet how we want to deal with that ... Discussion on this project continues on the Surveyor Robotics Forum. Posted Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:46 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 13 Jul 2008 Surveyor Corp and Inertia Labs team to build new quad-motor version of SRV-1 Blackfin Robot The new quad-motor version of the SRV-1 Blackfin Robot is now shipping. Created through cooperation between Surveyor Corporation and Inertia Labs, the new robot is smaller and lighter than the original SRV-1, measuring 5 x 4 x 3-inches @ 13-oz (12 x 10 x 8-cm @ 350gm) with a more compact Li Poly battery pack and quad-motor drive with tank-style treads. Inertia Labs is the highly regarded developer of Antweight fighting robots as well as full-sized BattleBots champions Toro, Matador and T-Minus. They are very skillful robot designers and fabricators. The new SRV-1 Blackfin Robot, designated SRV-1Q, is now available directly from Surveyor, Inertia Labs, and resellers worldwide. Posted Sun, 13 Jul 2008 20:31 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Mon, 07 Jul 2008 Prototype layout is finished for stereo Blackfin camera board Prototype boards should be here by end of next week. Here are the Eagle files: http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/bfin-stereo-v1.sch http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/bfin-stereo-v1.sbrd There is a continuing discussion of this project on the forum. Posted Mon, 07 Jul 2008 08:00 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Tue, 01 Jul 2008 Some thoughts about a stereo version of SRV-1 Blackfin Camera There has been an active discussion on the Surveyor Robotic Forum about the possibility of a stereo version of the SRV-1 Blackfin Camera - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1210703461. It looks like we will be moving ahead with this project and welcome comments on the design (to be published in Eagle 5 PCB format). Here is a mockup of the stereo board set created by setting 3 existing SRV-1 radio boards side-by-side. I believe this is pretty close to how the final layout will look. The dimensions seem reasonable - overall board size will be 6" x 2.5" (155 x 65mm), with the lens centers separated approximately 4.5" (115mm). Here are some current thoughts on the design: maintain the current mounting pattern (1" x 2") in the center section, but maybe add some mounting holes under the cameras provide a mounting hole for the wifi antenna possibly provide an H-bridge motor drive and a pair of transistor drivers from each camera, duplicating the existing radio/motor control functions define a different 32-pin header to bring out signals from both cameras and possibly the Matchport interconnect the two cameras via SPI and GPIO. Also, camera #1 will connect to Matchport serial channel 1 (port 10001), and camera #2 will connect to Matchport serial channel 2 (port 10002). add a 5V regulator for driving servos (e.g. pan/tilt) As soon as the new Eagle 5 arrives (maybe today), we will start working on this. The main question will be how to allocate signals to the board's expansion header. Part of the concept is to design this as a drop-in replacement for the existing SRV-1 controller, so users who already have the SRV-1 Blackfin can use their existing Blackfin camera and Matchport and will need only an additional Blackfin camera along with the stereo board. For new users, a complete stereo camera setup with both cameras and Wifi will probably cost in the ballpark of $550. Posted Tue, 01 Jul 2008 12:00 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 19 Jun 2008 Archiving and command line options added to SRV1Test.java TCP/UDP console We have made a few changes to the SRV1Test.java console application, adding the ability to use the command line to override default configuration variables and archive the incoming video frames: The default values are -remote_addr 169.254.0.10, -remote_port 10001, -protocol TCP, -local_port 10001. The -archive option causes SRV1Test to capture all incoming frames to the specified directory. Each frame will be stored with a sequential time tag, so you can use any of a variety of conversion programs to transform the JPEG frames to a movie format such as Quicktime, AVI, MPEG, Flash, e.g. http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpegtoavi/ http://www.stillhq.com/extracted/howto-jpeg2mpeg/output.html Here's the download link for SRV1Test.java: http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/SRV1Test.java Posted Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:30 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 12 Jun 2008 New Java-based test application for SRV-1 Blackfin - supports UDP & TCP connections We now have a simple java-based test application for UDP and TCP connections with the Matchport and SRV-1 Blackfin. SRV1Test.java source code is found here: http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/SRV1Test.java The protocol, IP address, and ports are hard-coded in the first lines of the SRV1Test.java source code: and provided the Java SDK is installed, the application is easy to compile and run: javac SRV1Test.java java SRV1Test The program quickly connects to the designated SRV-1 Matchport and begins to pull frames. While connected, the user can send SRV_protocol commands in ASCII or Hex and view the results. The Matchport can be configured for a UDP connection via the Matchport's web interface - Note that in UDP mode, the Matchport does not support hardware flow control, and we have seen that it can't keep up with the 2500kbps interface, though it works fine at 921kbps. We are looking at ways to overcome this flow control issue in the SRV-1 Blackfin firmware, but for the moment, please note this limitation. Again, here is the source code download link: http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/SRV1Test.java Posted Thu, 12 Jun 2008 12:49 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sat, 24 May 2008 Default Matchport configuration for SRV-1 Blackfin is now 2500kbps The special version of Matchport firmware (matchport-6500GE.rom) that Lantronix built for us has proven to be very robust, and in many ways, superior in performance to the default 6.6.0.0 firmware. As such, shipments of the SRV-1 Blackfin robot and SRV-1 Blackfin camera w/WIFI will henceforth be preconfigured with this 6500GE firmware on the Matchport and 2500kbps firmware on the Blackfin. Note that if you check the Matchport settings through the web interface, it will show the CPU Performance as medium and the baud rate at 9600. You can ignore these settings. In case you inadvertently reset the Matchport, you can recover the settings via telnet to port 9999, using the instructions shown here - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1209480141 Posted Sat, 24 May 2008 18:01 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 15 May 2008 Microsoft Robotics Studio 1.5 - test version of SRV-1 Blackfin support We just posted a test version of SRV-1 Blackfin support in MSRS 1.5 on the Surveyor Robotics Forum - see http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1210870698. The "Teleoperation" service provides a nice joystick-like control interface and easy configuration. Many thanks to Trevor Taylor of Software Technology, Australia, for providing this support. Trevor also provided support for the original ARM7-based SRV-1, as documented in his new book - "Professional Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio". Additional information on Trevor's work can be found here - http://www.soft-tech.com.au/MSRS/. Posted Thu, 15 May 2008 13:36 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 11 May 2008 Update for SRV-1 Blackfin command protocol specification The command protocol specification for SRV-1 Blackfin firmware has been updated to include latest additions, and reorganized semi-alphabetically to be more readable / usable. Latest version is found here - http://www.surveyor.com/SRV_protocol.html and here - http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/SRV_protocol_bf.html Posted Sun, 11 May 2008 12:13 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 08 May 2008 New Matchport / Zigbee radio board for SRV-1 Blackfin Abe Howell's Robotics - www.abotics.com - has developed a new radio board for the SRV-1 Blackfin which hosts either the Lantronix Matchport 802.11b/g or Digi/Maxstream Zigbee 802.14 radio, and interfaces to a second microcontroller operating at 5V. As many microcontrollers operate at 5V instead of the 3.3V we use for the Blackfin, this level shifting a very nice feature. The new board is open source, with all schematics published on the Abotics website, e.g. http://www.abotics.com/ExpressPCBs/OPEN_ROBOT_MATCHPORT_BOARD_SCHEMATIC.pdf and an assembly manual is provided here - http://www.abotics.com/MatchPort_PCB_Assembly.pdf. Visit http://abotics.com/open_robot.htm for more project details. We're really happy to see this board, as a number of our users are interfacing the SRV-1 Blackfin camera to other robot platforms with 5V logic. Also, this represents the first 3rd-party add-on board for the SRV-1 Blackfin, and we hope to see this trend continue. Posted Thu, 08 May 2008 20:23 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Tue, 06 May 2008 new visualization tool for color segmentation on SRV-1 Blackfin A new version of test firmware has been posted, as described here on the Surveyor Robotics Forum. It adds a new visualization tool for color segmentation, allowing the user to view in real time the actual matches in color bins defined by the 'vc' or color command. For example, in this new firmware, if we defined the following colors - vc0075225025100025100 (green) vc1075225025100175250 (orange) vc2075225100150175250 (red) vc3075225150225025100 (blue) and then issued the new 'g1' command, all of the pixels matching one of these color bins would be assigned a solid color (the midpoint of the range), and remaining pixels that don't match any colors would be painted black. For example, using the above set of colors, we printed out this graphic from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV put the printout in front of the camera, and looked for pixel matches. Here's the image before color segmentation was enabled - and the same camera view with color segmentation enabled - Here's an archived video showing the tracking of an orange golf ball in real time - note how my fingers block out part of the shape. Clearly, the color ranges have not been optimized, but you get the idea - http://www.surveyor.com/images/orange-ball-tracking.mov This color segmentation visualization tool should help considerably in dialing in color ranges for object location / tracking tasks. Posted Tue, 06 May 2008 12:34 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 04 May 2008 Report from Maker Faire We spent the day yesterday at Maker Faire, probably the largest DIY techno / craft / electronics gathering of its kind (60,000 projected attendees) anywhere. Lots of robots, a giant mousetrap, steam punk, an electric cupcake parade, r/c battleships battling with BB's, 800kV Van de Graff generator, flamethrowers, 20-ft homemade rockets, etc. Felt just like home ... Main purpose of attending was to support demos given by Team FREDnet for their Google Lunar X-Prize entry - they had a small swarm of SRV-1 Blackfin robots available for test drives, including a couple of prototypes of a quad-motor version we're developing with Inertia Labs. An SRV-1 Blackfin was also spotted in the RoboRealm booth, and there may have been other SRV-1's at the show. At the other end of the faire from the FREDnet project, we got to hang out with Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail at the geekdad.com booth. Chris is the creator of the DIYDrones, a very popular destination for UAV developers. In particular, Chris has been working on a couple of entry-level robotic blimps, and he asked us to bring YARB 1.0 to share the booth with BlimpDuino . There seems to be a lot of interest in robotic blimps, and it was fun to talk with Chris about a divide-and-conquer strategy for this as-yet-non-existent market. The Maker Faire is still running today, though YARB 1.0 won't be there. Next time, we'll plan for a longer trip plus a logo on the blimp (as it was featured but unidentified in a G4TV interview). Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 13:20 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... CIS1.5 Introduction to Programming using C++ (robotics application) - Brooklyn College (City University of New York) Brooklyn College has built cross-platform (Win, Mac, Linux) console support for the SRV-1 Blackfin and ARM7 for use in their course - CIS1.5 Introduction to Computing Using C++. This is part of a larger robotics education program called robotics.edu, which is a shared spaced for curricular materials used in educational robotics classes for middle school and undergraduates students. A complete lesson plan for a teleoperated robot lab, vision processing lab, and advanced vision processing is found here - http://agents.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/robotics.edu/bcsoftware.php. Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 11:22 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... RoboBrain - new console on Mac OS/X for SRV-1 Blackfin Voxatec (Switzerland) has created a very nice SRV-1 Blackfin console for Mac users which provides a virtual joystick, real-time video display, C program editor and C program upload. It is available both as an application bundle as well as an open source X-Code project. This a very nice interface that's optimized for Mac users, and the developer has plans for further feature extensions. Make certain to visit the RoboBrain website - www.voxatec.com Posted Sun, 04 May 2008 10:46 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 20 Apr 2008 Mobot '08 at CMU - congrats to John Palmisano and Pikachu At the 14th Annual Mobot Race, hosted this past week by School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University, Society of Robots founder John Palmisano used the SRV-1 Blackfin camera with his ERP (Experimental Robot Platform) to win 2nd place overall and gain a Judge's Choice Prize for most innovative design. Details of the design are found here - ERP (Experimental Robot Platform). Posted Sun, 20 Apr 2008 12:40 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 13 Apr 2008 exposure control for the OV9655 camera module After deriving a stable set of register settings for the OV9655 camera module last fall, there hasn't been much done with the settings except for addition of a command to invert the image orientation. It has seemed that the "shutter speed" as well as gain control are a bit slow, so I started to tweak some registers today and got some encouraging results. The formula provided by Omnivision for exposure time calculation is as follows: Exposure time = 1/PCLK x 2 x 1520 x (Exposure line + Dummy line) Where PCLK => Pixel output clock Exposure line = (0xA1[5:0] x 1024) + (0x10[7:0] x 4) + 0x04[1:0] Dummy line = (0x2E[7:0] x 256) + Value of 0x2D[7:0] The default settings are reg 0xA1 = 0x40, reg 0x10 = 0x40, reg 0x04 = 0x03. I experimented with reducing the value in the high order bits (reg 0xA1) from 0x40 to 0x20 to 0x10 and finally to 0x00. My guess is that there is a bounds checking in the firmware which sets a lower limit, as changing from 0x10 to 0x00 seemed to make no difference, but the change from 0x40 to 0x10 was noticeable, with reduced motion blurring and somewhat faster gain control response. The register settings are found in ov9655.h in the data structure: static unsigned char ov9655_setup[] {}; As noted, the current default setting for register 0xA1 is 0x40. I would be interested in hearing from others who want to experiment with these settings. The next step is to look at the gain control registers - it appears that registers 0x13 and 0x14 provide significant control of that function. By the way, the register definitions for the OV9655 are found here - http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/OV9655-datasheet.pdf Posted Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:33 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sat, 12 Apr 2008 more robot Lisp ... The basic motivation in adding Lisp to the SRV-1 firmware is to create a mechanism by which the robot processors could build adaptive world models and reason their way through that world. Our first attempt to integrate Lisp into the Blackfin firmware didn't go so well, though it exposed several problems - limits to the code size supported by the version of ldr-utils we use to build the .ldr firmware images, issues with the old Blackfin toolchain we were using and recommending (2006R2_RC6), and limits to extensibility as well as memory issues with the lithp code itself. After a long week of head-pounding, these issues seem to have been resolved - we have a new version of ldr-utils for Linux and Windows, we have successfully switched over to the 2008R1_RC8 version of the Blackfin toolchain, and another Lisp interpreter which may prove adequate for our near-term requirements has been integrated into firmware. Specifically, this version of Lisp was created by Dr Gregory Chaitin of IBM Research to develop proofs for theorems in set theory. It was originally written in Mathematica and then converted to C. Though not aligned with any particular Lisp dialect, it is compact, fast, and easy to use. Descriptions of the code are found here - http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/lisp.html http://www.umcs.maine.edu/~chaitin/rov.html (sample code at bottom of page) The interpreter in the latest firmware has not yet been connected to SRV-1 robot functions (other than memory and console), but robot functions will be added in the coming week, and stack monitoring as well garbage collection are planned. The interpreter can run programs from the flash buffer or operate interactively. The interactive mode is interesting, as we can configure the interpreter to load Lisp libraries from flash and then operate as the robot command processor. One thought is to add a natural language capability to the command interface. This experiment is just in its earliest stages, and we may discover that the Chaitin Lisp is similarly too limiting, requiring that we consider an Lisp implementation more fully defined such as PicoLisp or TinyScheme. For the moment, however, this seems like a reasonable starting point. Posted Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:00 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Wed, 02 Apr 2008 Just added a small Lisp interpreter to SRV-1 Blackfin firmware I have been exploring some alternatives to the C interpreter currently built into the SRV-1 Blackfin firmware as our onboard behavior scripting engine, and came across a very compact LISP interpreter called Lithp, written by Scott Anderson. Tucked into the SRV-1 firmware, the code takes just a bit more the 6 kbytes of program space, and while it hosts only a fairly limited subset of Common Lisp, the code is very clean and easy to extend, and it already has a lot of capability. The code is described here - http://www.umlautllama.com/projects/lithp/ and full documentation is found here - http://www.umlautllama.com/projects/lithp/lithp.pdf The interpreter runs a program that has been transferred to the onboard flash buffer either from flash memory, via XMODEM transfer, or directly entered through the onboard line editor. The 'P' command launches code execution. The SRV-1 firmware has now been split in to separate versions to support either the C interpreter or Lisp interpreter, but not both in the same image. The download link for the test version of firmware is found in this forum thread - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1207001321 To get this to run, some new memory management functions were added and the processor stack was moved. We are just at the beginning of the testing cycle, so some revisions should be expected. Also, none of the core motor, sensor or vision functions have been linked to Lisp calls, though that should follow shortly. One of the goals is to link Lisp functions to the neural net library now built into the firmware - some interesting possibilities for SRV-1 behavior development should emerge once we figure out how to tie those pieces together. Posted Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:02 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Mon, 31 Mar 2008 2.5Mbps test firmware for Matchport & SRV-1 Blackfin We have test build of firmware from Lantronix which enables us to run the SRV-1 Blackfin with the Matchport at 2.5Mbps. This is a special build that is available only to SRV-1 users, and all support for this version of firmware needs to go through Surveyor, not Lantronix. Configuration instructions are found here - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1207001321 Posted Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:15 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Tue, 25 Mar 2008 3.6mm f2.0 lens is now standard with SRV-1 Blackfin camera We have made a small change in the standard configuration of the SRV-1 Blackfin camera board. The standard lens is now the 3.6mm f2.0 previously offered as an option, replacing the 6.3mm f3.2 lens that originally shipped. The 3.6mm is a very nice lens, with much better light gathering than the 6.3mm. We are still offering the 2.2mm f2.5 wide angle lens as an option, combined with a right angle adapter to lay the OV9655 camera module parallel to the Blackfin processor card. Posted Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:40 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 23 Mar 2008 YARB 1.0 web page; perhaps some blimp kits in the future To chart our robotic blimp development, there's now a web page devoted to YARB 1.0 (and successors), which includes some links to other interesting blimp sites. http://www.surveyor.com/YARB.html There has been a fair amount of interest in this project, so we are starting to give some thought to offering a blimp kit to SRV-1 users. While we will continue to provide complete DIY information for low cost solutions, our current concept is to standardize on a somewhat higher-end platform with brushless motors and shrouds for the propellors. We're talking with a few potential suppliers, and will post additional info when available. Please send an email to support@surveyor.com if you have an active interest in this project. Posted Sun, 23 Mar 2008 22:28 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Mon, 17 Mar 2008 robotic blimp (YARB 1.0) update - sensors added The blimp now have some additional sensors - a pair of Maxbotics EZ0 ultrasonic ranging modules and a Honeywell HMC6532 I2C compass. Also, the camera module now points downward about 30-degrees via a simple extender. The camera angle is pretty good now - the wide angle lens has a field-of-view of approx 120-degrees, so the bottom of the frame captures the scenary almost directly below. At the moment, the sensor data is unfiltered, which allows us to get an idea of how much variation there might be. The ultrasonic data is pretty solid - the forward looking readings bounce around a bit, but the download readings are fairly consistent. However, I think we will change to a narrower beam module - probably the EZ1. Also, it would be nice to have a couple of side-looking modules to enable some degree of mapping capability. The compass is less consistent, and it turns out that we're getting magnetic field interference from the motors when they are running. At the time I recorded the video clip below, I wasn't paying attention to the readings, but subsequent tests show that the readings are varying by as much as 15-degrees when the motors are powered. Either we will have to move the compass, or add some compensation in software. Here's a snapshot of the gondola with the additional sensors - The plan is to make changes in the sensors to clean up the data, and then to write a script using the onboard C interpreter to let the blimp wander around on its own, perhaps following a course based on heading. After that, we will add some logic to use the camera to lock onto an object and follow it around while maintaining altitude and avoiding collision - that will be a bit more challenging. Here's some video captured from yesterday's test session. The caption overlay shows heading, forward distance and height above ground in inches. Posted Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:35 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 13 Mar 2008 YARB 1.0 (Yet Another Robotic Blimp) - first untethered flight In my never-ending quest to defy gravity with the SRV-1 Blackfin, I installed the camera board and radio on a 66-inch helium blimp (ordered without their motor controller for a $100 savings) - interfacing the H-bridge on the SRV-1 combo radio/motor board directly to the two prop motors and one of the Blackfin's timer channels to the servo which vectors the prop thrust. Here's SRV1Console with some different buttons that control the vectoring of the props and invert the video (the Blackfin board is suspended upside-down from the blimp gondola). Using SRV1Console's archiving feature, I captured the video feed while piloting the blimp around the hallway and front room from my office. The blimp is surprisingly easy to pilot - this was my first attempt, and I didn't break anything, though there were some close encounters. The camera's a bit out of focus in the following video and the afternoon light washes out the scene somewhat, but you get the general idea. Next step is to add ultrasonic sensors and a compass in order to start programming some autonomous exploration. This promises to be a very interesting project. Posted Thu, 13 Mar 2008 20:01 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Wed, 05 Mar 2008 new test version of SRV-1 Blackfin firmware A new test build of firmware has been posted, as discussed on the robot forum - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1204750102 and posted to SVN at https://ssl.untyped.com/svn/repos/surveyor.com/srv-blackfin/trunk/SRV/ The following changes/additions to srv-blackfin-022608 are included in this test version - added 'iR' command to read two bytes from i2c device ('ir' command only reads single byte). corresponding C-func is readi2c2(); added silent_console flag to disable console output during execution of interpreted C programs changed C-func blob() to retrieve multiple blobs - blob(colorbin#, blob#). first call to blob(color, 0) will trigger new blob search, with blobs sorted by size. cnt = blob(color, 1) will retrieve the 2nd largest blob, etc. added C-func imgrcap() to capture a reference frame and imgdiff() to compute difference between reference frame and current frame added bp.c backprop neural net library, but haven't connected it to any inputs or outputs yet Also, there are some new file transfer scripts for srv1.ldr and C-test.c - take a look at send-ldr.sh and send-c.sh, but make certain to change IP addresses before using these. I believe that lsz be used interchangeably with sx. By the way, if anyone knows of Windows versions of sx or lsz, please let us know. Posted Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:21 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Tue, 26 Feb 2008 another fun SRV-1 Blackfin firmware extension - real-time frame differencing Just added a couple of functions for storing a reference frame and differencing that reference frame against the most recently captured frame. This will be useful for laser range finding, by comparing frames with and without the lasers on, and it will also be quite useful for motion detection. Here's an example frame sequence: #1 - normal capture #2 - normal capture with lasers on #3 - reference frame captured with lasers off, frame difference shown #4 - lasers now on, frame difference shown Here's a motion detection example: #5 - normal view before capturing reference frame #6 - differencing enabled, no motion #7 - differencing enabled, motion detected More details on this test version of SRV-1 Blackfin firmware are found on the Surveyor Robotics Forum and code is posted to our SVN repository Posted Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:21 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 21 Feb 2008 SRV1Console java source code posted SRV1Console.java can now be downloaded from http://www.surveyor.com/blackfin/ To compile - javac -classpath .:ImageButton:RXTXcomm.jar:wstreamd_embed.jar: SRV1Console.java Please note that this code is GPL open source, so modifications and extensions are meant to be shared. Posted Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:32 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Wed, 20 Feb 2008 Test firmware; revised (simplified) bundling of SRV-1 Blackfin board set In response to user requests, we have recently added a number of features to the SRV-1 firmware, including a failsafe mode as well as support for servos and electronic speed controllers, ultrasonic ranging modules, accelerometers, and I2C devices, as discussed here on the robot forum. While the firmware is available for testing, it hasn't yet been formally released, as a few image processing functions still need to be added, but this is expected to wrap up by the end of the month. Many of the firmware requests are coming from users who are building their own motorized robot bases or UAVs, and we are finding an increasing number of users want the SRV-1 Blackfin board set without the motorized base. We are glad to see this trend, and to accommodate this, we have reorganized our SRV-1 board bundle to include all of the electronics of the SRV-1 robot except for the battery and motorized base, i.e. the SRV-1 Blackfin Camera board (500MHz BF537 Blackfin and OV9655 1.3Mpix camera), combo radio/motor board, Lantronix Matchport WiFi module, antenna, and 2 laser pointers. A complete description of the bundle is found here. Posted Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:25 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Fri, 08 Feb 2008 Transterpreter, occam-pi and concurrency on the SRV-1 Blackfin I first met members of the Transterpreter development group from University of Kent last year at the AAAI Spring Symposium at Stanford, and was really impressed with their architecture and portability of their tools, as demonstrated by their performance in the competition at the end of the conference - http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/robot_journal.cgi/2007/03/29#091 and http://www.surveyor.com/cgi-bin/robot_journal.cgi/2007/04/09#094. Since that time, the group has scattered somewhat, with Christian finishing his PhD and moving to France, Jon joining the PhD program at Kent, and Matt returning to the US as a visiting professor at Olin College. However, Matt contacted us a few months ago looking for robots to use in an engineering class, enlisting Jon and others to help with a port of the Transterpreter to the SRV-1 Blackfin. The results are pretty spectacular ... Matt and his team have built a complete graphical development environment for the SRV-1 using existing Transterpreter tools. You write some code in the occam-pi programming language, hit "Compile", hit "Run", and it uploads your code to the SRV and you're rolling. They have provided an easy way to send and receive text from the SRV-1 as well as images; if the robot transmits an image, the IDE automatically catches the image header and opens up a window of the appropriate size to display the image. They have also written the entire SRV-1 control loop in occam-pi, so that it can be easily modified. A more complete description of the development environment is found here on the Transterpreter blog, with additional blog posts describing other aspects of the project. This is a very exciting development - projects like the Transterpreter port and the Matlab port mentioned yesterday significantly leverage the core development work we're doing for the SRV-1 Blackfin, and this is very rewarding to see. Posted Fri, 08 Feb 2008 13:50 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 07 Feb 2008 Matlab support for SRV-1 Professor Ani Hsieh of Swarthmore College has developed a mobile robotics course for the current semester using the SRV-1 with Matlab. The course website is found here - http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/mhsieh1/Courses/E28/. The SRV-1 Matlab code and description are found via the SRV-1 Robot link, and a very interesting set of class projects are outlined via the Projects link. This looks like a great course ! We look forward to highlighting some of the completed projects. Posted Thu, 07 Feb 2008 10:10 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Mon, 04 Feb 2008 another SRV-1 Blackfin servo control example - Lynxmotion Tri-Track Here's an example of interfacing the SRV-1 Blackfin camera board and wifi radio module to another motorized base. In this case, it is a Lynxmotion Tri-Track Base with Dimension Engineering Sabertooth 2x10 motor controller that are driven from the SRV-1 board set. A build log is found here in the Surveyor Robotics Journal, and a project blog is found here Nicely done ! Posted Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:20 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Sun, 03 Feb 2008 driving servos and speed controllers from the SRV-1 Blackfin We have several interesting projects in the works involving motorized drives other than the SRV-1 robot base. One of these project is a unique unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that uses a pair of counter-rotating fixed-blade props for lift and a couple of servos that shift the battery weight around to effect steering, similar in principle to the old Hiller Flying Platform. This is called a coaxial rotor because we have a motor assembly with two brushless DC motors that are aligned with the shaft of one motor passing through the hollow shaft of another motor - see http://www.maxxprod.com/pdf/CR2805.pdf. The motors are driven with R/C airplane electronic speed controllers that take servo-style PPM (pulse position modulation) signals, we are able to modify the Blackfin processor's timer functions to a waveform that can drive PPM circuits. We are using the two timer channels that otherwise were driving the SRV-1 robot H-bridge with PWM waveforms to drive to two prop motor speed controllers. Another two servo signals come from the two pins that can alternatively be used as a second UART on the Blackfin, and the using a 5VDC regulator off the battery to power the servos and speed controllers. Note that the 3.3V logic of the Blackfin has no trouble driving the 5V logic of the servos. The SRV-1 Blackfin is used here with our WiFi radio board that carries the Matchport 802.11g radio module. For remote control and monitoring, we modified some button definitions of SRV1Console to generate the flight controls, but didn't have to change any of the java code ... The servo controls from the Blackfin work quite well. Our steering is another matter, as you can see from the following video clip ... click here if you can't access the YouTube clip In any case, this is a good start on a really interesting project, and the next step will be to add sensors for attitude (pitch/roll) and rotation (yaw) However, You can read more about this and other related projects, plus find links to download test firmware from this thread on the Surveyor Robotics Forum Posted Sun, 03 Feb 2008 23:50 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Thu, 17 Jan 2008 SRV-1 USB configuration board for Matchport WLAN module We recently started to employ our leftover Zigbee USB interface boards with Silicon Labs CP2102 USB bridge chips for configuring the Matchport. It's a simple modification requiring the USB board, a 4-pin male header (2x2), and 3 wires. We connect the GND signal from the USB board to pin position 2 of the header, TX to pin position 3, and RX to pin position 4. We then remove the SRV-1 Blackfin camera card from the robot and plug the new header into the 32-pin expansion port, as shown here - The drivers for the CP2102 are built into Linux, and can be downloaded for Windows or OS/X from http://www.surveyor.com/srvdownload/ . To configure the Matchport, start a terminal program that interfaces to the USB board, change the baud rate to 9600, turn on the robot power and quickly (within a few seconds) type 3 'x' characters, and you should get the configuration menu for the Matchport. You may find additional information about this procedure in a discussion thread on the Surveyor Robotics Forum. We have started to include these boards in kit form along with new robot shipments (one USB board per location - you will have to solder the wires and header yourself). There is no charge except possibly postage for non-US customers. If interested, existing customers should send an email request to support@surveyor.com. Posted Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:25 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Fri, 11 Jan 2008 new SVN archive for SRV-1 firmware Thanks to the Transterpreter development group, we now have an SVN archive for the SRV-1 firmware - http://srv.transterpreter.org/ From the command-line, svn co http://srv.transterpreter.org/ will check out the entire repository. To get only the trunk, svn co http://srv.transterpreter.org/srv-blackfin/trunk Posted Fri, 11 Jan 2008 13:38 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ... Wed, 02 Jan 2008 Switching SRV-1 production over to combo radio/motor control board As mentioned a few weeks ago, we redesigned the radio and motor control boards to combine functions of WLAN radio, motor control and laser drivers onto a single circuit board. The result is reduction of the overall SRV-1 height by almost 5/8" (16mm) and greatly simplified robot assembly. The new combo board does not provide the Zigbee socket or back-emf circuit, but does add support for the 2nd Matchport UART. We plan to offer the original radio and motor boards as an option if we get many requests, and we will also consider requests from SRV-1 Blackfin robot owners who want to switch to the new combo board configuration. Schematics for the original boards are still posted on the SRV-1 Blackfin download page, but starting today (January 2, 2008), SRV-1 robots will be shipping with the new configuration. Posted Wed, 02 Jan 2008 11:41 \| HTML Link \| see additional stories ...