Aeronetworks sro - Airborne Linux

My new rover is supposed to be simpler than the first one and something that irked me with the first design was the motor controllers.  They worked, but they are ridiculously complicated.  So I bought a Sparkfun Monster Moto Controller and hooked it up - much simpler. The only hassles with it is that if you would plug another board on top of it, then it could short to the tops of the capacitors and the VIN connector could short to the Arduino ICS pins underneath it.  I stuck a rectangle of clear plastic cut from some screws packaging between the boards and snipped the ICS pins off - done. Serial Control Controlling a DC motor is straight forward, using two pins to switch the H bridge direction (INA1, INB1) and one for speed PWM (PWM1).  There is also a current sense input (CS1) that you can set to turn the motors off if they get stuck and the current increases too much.  You'll have to set the sense level with trial and terror. Here is an example for a serial motor contro

Doing digital signal processing on a teeny weeny Arduino processor requires some trade-offs, since it is slow and doesn't have much memory.  However, bear in mind that today's embedded processors are faster than yesteryear's DSPs, so all you need to do, is use yesteryear's methods! What it mostly amounts to, is careful use of integers and shifts, instead of floating point numbers and multiplies.  If you can, limit multiplies, divides and buffer sizes to powers of 2.  That affords enormous speed optimizations. Circular Buffers For example, let's filter input from an 8 or 10 bit A/D on a little 16 bit embedded processor.  This usually requires a low pass filter.  A simple low pass filter is a moving average and to do that, you need to keep a buffer of old data values. If you are smart, then you will set up a circular buffer with 10 values, but if you are smarter, then you will use a buffer with 8 or 16 values instead - why? If the buffer size is a

Beeping Computer Way back during the time of the dinosaurs, circa 1975, when one turned on a desktop computer, it would go Beep!   That fell out of favour once Microsoft figured out how to make a computer take 3 minutes to boot up, before finally being able to emit a simple beep.   However, it is still common practice to test a new little embedded controller by flashing a LED. Music vs Noise Now for those tinkerers who are a little more adventurous: How about pleasant sounding random noise?  There are two things that help to make noise sound acceptable: Use a tonal scale that everyone is used to. Avoid obvious dissonance. Scales We could use a Pythagorian scale with 7 notes per octave and perfect harmony, but then it will sound weird - like a Scottish bag-pipe and I don't have enough Scottish genes in my ears to prevent them from bleeding. The equal tempered (logarithmic) scale of Johan Bach ( Das Wohltemperirte Clavier, 1722) ), with concert pitch (1939), is us