Life got in the way. I hate it when it does that. Why can’t things like work, taxes, dishes, and doctors appointments just take care of themselves? Why must I be involved?
But over the last few weeks I got back into the grove of things. I started working on my AVC robot. The first order of business was to learn Kicad. See (TBD)
The next learning experience was to fabricate a face plate for the sailboat project. For this I decided to try out Ponoko. You send them Cad files and they were laser cut your design from numerous flat sheet materials like paper, wood, fabric, or in my case a pretty blue acrylic. The results were fantastic, although possibly more expensive than I would like. See TBD
Next came schematic entry of my AVC design into Kicad with the idea to have a board fabricated for that. I hate the whole wirewrapped perfboard implementation. I worry about broken wires, and noise from the lack of a ground plane. I also took this opportunity to think hard about the the processor I want to use. I may start looking into the Atmel SAM-E70. See (TBD)
Over Christmas (yes four months ago) I got a Mojo FPGA development kit. Not like I needed any more projects, but I wanted to get a better understanding about them. We use them at work, and they were always a bit of a mystery to me. So I have set up the goal to include an FPGA in my AVC design and use it for various things including obstacle avoidance. See TBD
I also got the LIDAR-Lite (V2) around Christmas. I got it up and running quickly but had some small issues with it. By the time I got back to trying to figure things out, I discovered the company had been purchased by Garmin and has gone off the radar. The website it busted and the units are no longer for sale. So I will do the best I can and get it installed into my AVC entry. See TBD.
And lastly I got a small OLED display from Sparkfun. I want to use the display fold telemetry data into my Mobius action camera footage. This has been an interesting project combining optics, and electronics. See TBD.