HOW-TO: Make a Remote Controlled vehicle with an SBC

[danhoskin]

It's all working great so far but I think the fact that my lan cable is running right beside a 600 v motor cable may be at least partly responsible for the webservice issues I am having. We are giving the wireless a try on the project.
Do you think we would be OK for bandwidth on the SBC with the USB wireless adapter that came with the SBC and 3 Advanced Servo (8) cards attached?

This is the part of your post that got me thinking about it:

ISSUES: NETWORK LATENCY
The SBC runs a USB 1.1 bus. That gives it 12mbit of bandwidth for ALL USB devices on the SBC. That includes all of the phidgets, the webcam, and wifi. If there's too much happening at once, things will start to get delayed. This usually isn't a problem, you can normally get away with a webcam, wifi, and a few phidgets provided that you aren't hammering it with commands.

Thanks,
Dan

[Robert]

That won't be a problem. The Phidgets themselves consume a fairly small amount of bandwidth.

[didier.bravo]

Great post Robert,

so if I understood this correctly, you created an application using the phidgets library on windows. then you set up the wireless on theSBC and now you can control your tank from your PC using the jostick. i understand you did more things to connect the josticks and to set up the wireless and all that. but basically that's it right?

this is great for me. i would start a new project with the new SBC2 but i dont know if i would find some limitations with the usb or the wireless adapter. have you tried or know something about this new sbc2??

one more thing, how difficult would be to create a script or a program (i still don't know how that works) that runs on the SBC an not on the pc.

Regards

[Jacob]

This does not appear work on my SBC2.

find / -name *usb-wifi*
returns /lib/udev/rules.d/60-usb-wifi.rules

Which contains

SUBSYSTEM=="net", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", KERNEL=="wlan*", RUN+="wifi.agent"


Does this work on the SBC2?

[_Dejan_]

This does not appear work on my SBC2.

find / -name *usb-wifi*
returns /lib/udev/rules.d/60-usb-wifi.rules

Which contains

SUBSYSTEM=="net", SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", KERNEL=="wlan*", RUN+="wifi.agent"


Does this work on the SBC2?

SBC2 work on different OS than SBC1, so network configuration is different...

[Jacob]

I got it

Type

Code: Select all

vi /etc/init.d/mystartup.sh

In your new file enter

Code: Select all

#!/bin/sh
ifconfig wlan0 down
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
iwconfig wlan0 essid 'test'
iwconfig wlan0 key 1234567890
ifconfig wlan0 up
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.2

Type

Code: Select all

chmod +x /etc/init.d/mystartup.sh

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update-rc.d mystartup.sh defaults 100

And your done!

[EEPBppt]

Rob thanks for this tutorial, it was very helpfull. I made a robot similar to your tank wich everyone liked at school, but I have a problem with the time it takes to respond to my comands. It is controlled with the wiimote and it takes around 5 seconds to respond ( sometimes it takes even more) I think is because I haven´t used the AD-HOC conection. Would thar really help?
Also I would like to add proximity sensors so that the robot stop in case of an inminent crash. But again the time it takes for the feedback is too much I just want to know if it will help to add the AD-HOC conection before doing it . You can watch a video of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4Ki_D9187M
Thanks and congratulations for your tank its very cool

[pmrawk]

These directions were great! Is it possible to use WPA2 in ad-hoc mode on the SBC2? I thought about editing thewpa_supplicant.conf file, but it says that it will be overwritten. Is there a better way to enable WPA2 on the SBC2s?

[Patrick]

look into hostapd - this puts the wifi interface into real access point mode (master mode), not ad-hoc, and you can configure it for WPA2, etc. just like a real access point.

-Patrick

[yannick]

Hi Robert, you said you can connect multiple webcams on the SBC board, I was wondering did you have to make some changes to the SBC software itself or did it work right away when pluggin the second webcam in? I need to have 2 webcams on the SBC and I can only get 1 working at the time. I connected to the SBC remotely and I can see both webcams in /dev/video0 and /dev/video1, I can switch from one cam to the other by using the script /lib/udev/mjpg_streamer.agent provided, but every time I try to turn on the second cam, the first one goes off.

Please let me know if you can help me with this.

Yannick