Wednesday, February 22, 2012

It Worked for Me - Serial Proxy, Arduino and Windows 7

Tonight I was working on getting an Arduino accessible via TCP/IP using serproxy on Windows 7 64bit.  I got it to the point where I can connect to my pc via telnet using the port in the serproxy.cfg file and get output from the Arduino.

I used a copy from tinkerit on google code in the comments by lanj... The modified source code can be downloaded from Alejandro Valenzuela Roca's blog.

Initially I had a the problem described on the comments where I could connect via telnet to the port and get output once but after that I would get 'Failed to open comm port - Connection refused' errors.  The fix was to change the _close statement in sio.c in the sio_close routine to CloseHandle.

To compile serproxy I used CodeBlocks and imported the serproxy.dsp project file.  After doing this and making the above change I was able to recompile it and successfully connect to the Arduino multiple times.

I tested successfully using both COM5 and COM14.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

aBot – Time for a Break

After two months of working on wheel encoders I have decided to take a break from aBot and spend some time working on making upgrades to my Bicycle Trainer Project.

For the background on this project which I worked on the winter before last see this post.

Monday, February 6, 2012

aBot – Break Beam Wheel Encoder

The two analog wheel encoder designs I have been working with don’t have the level of simplicity I was hoping for.  As a result I have decided to try an all digital design that makes use of a break beam sensor.  The break beam design means developing a move complicated encoder disk but greatly simplifies the electronics.

The core of this design is a Rohm Semiconductor RPI-352 Photointerrupter.  In the picture below you can see the physical setup. 

RobotEncoderV4RobotEncoderV4-3
The photointerrupter is connected using double sided tape to a piece of perfboard that has been fashioned into an L.  The perfboard is connected to the aBot frame.  The photointerrupter straddles a plastic disk which has holes punched through it.

The leads from the photointerrupter are then connected to pins 2 and 3 on the boardino.

RobotEncoderV4-2
Over the next couple of weeks I will work on getting the software setup.