Shaneo's Blog Site

PackBot simulator

shane — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:34:48 +0000

The first version of robotSim included a simulation of a basic PackBot robot. The simulated robot has since gotten a complete overhaul.

Cogmation has done a lot of work to accurately simulate the PackBot510 with EDO kit. The robot now sports a realistic track-drive system with flippers, multiple cameras and sensors (wide angle camera, pan/tilt camera, laser scanner, etc…), and a fully articulated arm.

Here’s a short video of the robot in action.

Mono 2.4 OS X Serial Port

shane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 23:41:43 +0000

Mono is a greate solution for anyone looking to do some cross platform development. Most of the .Net API has been implemented and functions the same as Microsoft’s version. Although, one thing that does not work under OS X is the serial port.

This seems to be a known issue with the Mono devel team, however, at work we rely heavily on communication over the serial port and needed a solution fast. Therefore, I reimplement the serial driver for OS X. The new version does not rely on the libmonoposixhelper but rather creates a wrapper for the standard libc functions. Most of the API is the same as .Net/Mono and therefore should be easily interchangable.

The OS X serial port is available on the downloads page.

Server back up

shane — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:08:00 +0000

It’s been about a week now since I decided to upgrade my server and I have just now finally gotten it back online. The good news is that the server is faster and has more space. The bad news, the drive that the site was stored on crashed and I lost the entire thing

I now have the site stored on a set of Raid disks so that I wont lose it ever again. I’ll try to get the most important stuff posted again in the next few days.