How to contruct a self-balancing robot

This is part of a series of posts covering the development of a self-balancing robot: Modelling an inverted pendulum This post Dertermining the centre of gravity for a self-balancing robot   Previously we investigated how to model an inverted pendulum. It is now time to go ahead and build the […]

First steps with ROS

As with many other complex problems, we can often solve and handle robotic problems more effectively if we break them up into smaller pieces. One way to achieve this is by using ROS (Robot Operating System), which promotes a more distributed design approach. The basic idea is that we break […]

Blob detection and tracking

In an upcoming project I want to experiment with image recognition and have a balance robot track and follow a colored ball. As a prelude to that project and to learn more about what is involved in terms of the image processing I came up with a smaller sub project. […]

Creating an E-ink weather notification board

I love e-ink displays. Their ability to make something digital seem just a little bit analogue intrigues me and I just had to make anything that makes use of one. Like many, many other people on the internet that turned out to be a weather station. The initial aim, seeing […]

RetroPie Arcade Part 4 – Completing the build

 Part 1, part 2 and part 3 of this build can be found in the links. In this post we will look at how to complete the build now that we have Retropie running on the Raspberry Pi, the screen working and an enclosure to put everything in. Controller The initial planning […]

RetroPie Arcade Part 3 – The enclosure

Part 1 and part 2 of this build can be found in links. The size of the enclosure, and the whole system, was completely dictated by the size of the screen I decided to use. The initial idea was to buy cheap portable game systems from eBay, remove whatever was […]

RetroPie Arcade Part 2 – The screen

Part 1 can be found here. My aim for this project was to fit the largest screen possible that I would consider portable. Just based on availability and the screen sizes of cellphones I decided that 5″ was the size to aim for. For  reasons I cannot remember this did […]

“A drone is born” – Deel 1

10 February 2011 het ek 4 motors, 4 elektroniese spoed beheerders (ESC’s) en ‘n paar ander los komponente gekoop. Baie opgewonde oor die vooruitsig om vir my ‘n hommeltuig van die grond af op te bou, op daardie stadium het ons nog helikopters in LS gebruik en ‘n hommeltuig was […]