The GnuVision Blog

And finally, it moves!

The servo’s are powered by four 1.5V batteries. The main board is still not battery powered - have to test with two 9V batteries after the kernel is recompiled to disable as many power draining units as possible (according to the manual, the ethernet interfaces are the most power hungry - […]

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C, for example, ia a beautiful language in the category of “portable assemblers”. In that category C is powerful thanks to its libraries, simple and easily implementable thanks to its syntax and semantics, portable due to very clever and clean hardware abstraction.

I think that Lua is to “high level scripting languages” is what C […]

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Well, this is a different kind of ping; and I have been playing with it for the past two days - the last technical issue to be resolved before I integrate everything and can start dreaming of this!
The Parallax PING sensor has a simple `one-wire’ interface - you send a LOW-HIGH-LOW TTL pulse (HIGH […]

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Got the Parallax continuous rotation servo to work perfectly today morning! I think this is the easiest type of motor control you can ever have - simply send pulses with different ON times and the servo rotates in both directions at different speeds!
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Work to be done: get the sonar working - clean up […]

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The AT32AP7000 processor has two 16 bit timer/counter units each with three independent channels. TC0 (timer/counter unit 0) is used by the GNU/Linux kernel - so we will not touch it. We shall see how to program the timer/counter unit 1.
Programming the TC
This is off-topic, but I think I should mention it. There ARE […]

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Tested the PWM unit - had it been something like the Atmega without the burden of an OS on top of it, things would have been over in 10 minutes. But since I wanted to do things the `proper’ way (stick with the interfaces which the kernel provides), it took some time […]

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Here is more about programming the PIO controller. As usual, you will have to reload the page once or twice to get things rendered correctly.
Things are going to become more interesting … I have some really cool stuff from Parallax which I am going to hook onto my ATNGW100.

The idea is to do something […]

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The mechanical dimensions of the ATNGW100 are given here. There are 3 expansion headers available - J5,J6 and J7. The pinout details are given here. I want to gain access to the PWM channels - so I decided to go with J5. An old hard disk cable came handy.

A few neat configfs tricks later, […]

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Ready to hack the kernel…
Note that the page rendering problems persist.

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Just a Hello, world, for now!
Note: There seems to be some problem with the way the linked site is rendered in Firefox. Try reloading the page one or two times and things should be fine.

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