Moose-mousse - Electronic Moose

Sometimes you just accept a flaw and move along

So I am building a robot from scratch. It just needs to be a platform for my other projects. It takes Twist commands (Basically, orders how fast to move in what directions) and return odometry (Basically, where the robot thinks it is), both over wifi via the HTTP protocol. Because the odometry math is a lot easier with stepper motors(motors that moves in tiny discreet steps. Usually several hundreds for a single rotation), these are what I am using: I am using 2 TMC2100 boards to drive them. These have 2 pins that you can set to Ground, supply or let them float, and they are used to configure what amount of micro-stepping you want to do (If a stepper motor have 200 steps for a rotation, micro stepping 4 means it takes 4 smaller steps to do one of those 200 "real" steps, and so takes 800 steps for a full rotation) All great... eeeeexept... for some reason the configuration pins just does... nothing, no matter what I set them to. The boards are just stuck at 16 micro-steps, as if both pins where set to supply. This limits the robots speed to 0.3 meters per second... which is... fine. The amount of work and money it would take to fix this(Likely I would have to buy new boards) is not worth a speed boost that is not needed for the first 2-3 projects I want to test on top of it... so I am just leaving it. "Perfect is the enemy of good" and all that... but it still feels unsatisfying... blaaa

The Universal Serial Bus is often not universal...

So there is this problem you often run into when doing development. You come up with a solution. You research the solution, and find only tiny amounts of people talking about it, and/or they seem to say many different things and disagree. Most of the time, that is for 2 reasons 1: it is a very novel solution, so no one have tried it much, and everyone who have, has made very custom versions of it. 2: There are variables that makes it impossible to do it in one single way. I needed a rechargeable battery system to power my robot. These can get... VERY complicated, and pre-made solutions can quickly be expensive and you might end up with batteries catching fire, or destroying the batteries so they can never be used again. You need protections on them, but which kind depends on a bunch of things. I know electronics, but I am mainly a software guy, and I know when I do not know enough about electronics to do it myself. This being such a case. So, I came up with the idea to use powerbanks. One for each steppermotor, and one for the microcontroller(so the noise fromt he motors could not cause issues).If I use ones that can output enough amperage, they should just work and they are cheap. They are meant to be used by normal costumers, so have all the protection needed, and are quite idiot-proof(Which is a very handy thing when you are an idiot, like me) so should be easy to use. But I could not find much info about doing this... and I did not realize I was looking at reason 2. Basically, BECAUSE powerbanks are idiotproof, they do not want to discharge themselves unless there is a real device at the end of the USB cable. So if they cannot detect one, they turn off after about a second. How do they determine if there is a real device? Depends on the power bank.... No really, there is NO standard way to do it, as far as I can tell. And it does not depend on the power bank MODEL. I have 2 identical power banks, bought at the same time, and they do NOT behave the same. Which means that when I connected the powerbanks to supply my system, they (SOMETIMES) did not supply anything. Some check how much current is being drawn, which can be faked with a resistor wasting some power. 500mA was being quoted a lot, but that is more of a "That is probably enough to get it going". Others check for impedance(Basically, also resistance, but from frequency dependent sources). Those can be "faked" by having a coil or a device that acts like one to the faking resistor. I wanted a tiny 5 volt fan to cool the stepper motor drivers anyway, so I had one power bank also power that. That ensured that it actually stayed on (But if I used the other, (identical!) power bank it just turned off anyway). The other one could be connected up directly. If I used the powerbanks lower amperage socket. If I used the high amperage one, it just turned off. So now it works... I have 2 powerbanks for the motors, each with painters tape marking which powerbank and socket to use for what. Took me a week longer than I had hoped to figure all this out and do all the experiments. Sometimes, things that should be simple are just headaches.

Polyamory is about timing your breakdowns so that they don’t coincide with any of your partner’s breakdowns.

So... fun fact, there is a orwellian reference in the CANopen protocol.

We, as humans, made thousands and thousands of robots constantly keep track of how far we are from 1984... just because...

You were dumb, and that is GREAT

The reason you remember yourself as being dumb, and making bad decisions... is because you, now, are smarter than that person was. You have developed your skills, your empathy, your critical thinking. You have grown. You have become a better person. And that is GREAT. That is NOT a sad fact. So keep growing. And hopefully, when future you looks back on you, now, they have gotten better yet again.