Sunday, June 30, 2013

My first post

My love for electronics started around 5-6 grade at school. From my childhood i was fascinated about robots and electronics. During those days, there were not even a single gadget (CRT TV, Tape Recorder i am talking about electronics in 90s) at my home which escaped my screw drivers. With more curiosity, i used to open every one of them to find what's there inside with an expectation to learn how they function. Most of the times i have ended up spoiling them. Ok enough i don’t want to bore you any more with my childhood love for electronics. It's been 2 decades  and nothing has changed,  except for my latest tech(CRT TV to LCD TV, Tape recorder to medic enter etc). In this post i am going to share one of my hobby electronics Project. Real courtesy should go to my partner who bears all my crazy hobby. At times i sit starring at nothing or sit producing smoke out of soldering iron or being an insomniac. But i don't have patience if she stares at TV for a movie or creates smoke(aroma )in pooja(worship) room with incense sticks or doing art /craft leaving me behind without snack while i sit and watch 1983 cricket world cup finals for the 100th time.

This blog post is about my latest attraction called Raspberry pi(RPi) a credit card size computer for 25$. I believe this will be soon a revolution in world of computers because of its price and open source nature. This had already reached  schools in every nook and corners in Europe and some African countries . There have been many similar small computers but the price puts a spot light on it, thanks to Eben upton and his raspberry foundation for such a wonderful solution. The day  i heard about this product i fell in love with that.The name Raspberry Pi rings a bell in my mind  in the world apples ,desserts and windows. Some refresher about Raspberry Pi(Copy and paste from some where)
The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (The firmware includes a number of "Turbo" modes so that the user can attempt overclocking, up to 1 GHz, without affecting the warranty), VideoCore IV GPU,[12] and originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded to 512MB. It does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, but uses an SD card for booting and long-term storage. It is to offered in two versions, priced at US$25(Version A-No Ethernet and One USB Port) and US$35(Version B-512MB RAM, 2 USB port and an Ethernet port.) 
 Following are some of the working distributions for Raspberry Pi
1.     Raspbian “wheezy” -Debian distribution
2.      Soft-float Debian “wheezy”- Debian distribution
3.      Arch Linux ARM- Arch Linux ARM is based on Arch Linux, which aims for simplicity and full control to the end user.
4.      RISC OS
5.      RASPBMC- Raspbmc is a minimal Linux distribution based on Debian that brings XBMC to your Raspberry Pi.

With any of the above distribution in SD card, Monitor (RCA/HMDI), USB keyboard, WIFI/Ethernet cable this can become a mini PC.This has become very popular in less than a year because it’s cheap and all the interface including GPIO, I2C, SPI, UART are easily accessible.

In Raspberry Pi forum i have seen people using RPi like microcontrollers in all over their projects starting from Robotics, PC to media center. The only drawback is RPi doesn’t have any analog interface. Any micro controller with configurable Analog and digital Resources could easily fill the analog and some missing digital parts of RPi and form a complete solution.
People use python, java , C and various languages to build systems using RPi. Librararies for using RPi can be found in below sites
Java- http://pi4j.com/
C- http://www.airspayce.com/mikem/bcm2835/
Python- https://pypi.python.org/pypi
My choice was to use Java running in Debian Wheezy.If you think i might be good at java ,you are wrong but I  i have a neighbor called Sridhar who is an Java expert.

My idea was to create Robot which will act as steward @my Home. Below will be some of it's features. First four of them are implemented and other features are under development.
1.      Obstacle detection and estimation of object distance.-Done
2.      Four wheel drive with differential steering.-Done
3.      Power through battery pack and will have self charging.-Done
4.      Control all the devices in home using IR communication (Universal remote control which can be operated via voice.).-Done
5.     Ability to find its acceleration, angular movement, Ambient light, temperature as motion feedback.-Done
6.      Speech Recognition using Google API
7.      Speech synthesis.
8.      Gesture and object recognition.
9.      Maping of particular room or area using Kinect and OpenCV.
10.  Control my entertainment system, Download and stream music/Video from network/internet using DLNA.
11.  Interface with mobiles phone using Bluetooth and on receiving a voice call/ message will deliver it to correct person through it speaker/microphone.
12.  Display emails to the concerned person.
13.  Touch screen interface with display
14.  Thermal management of the system.
And the list keeps growing with my imagination. This may look too ambitious. But i don't want to limit my dreaming.
Here are some pictures of my RPi Based Robot and video of it in action. I call this π-Bot


Pic1-Full assembled π bot


Pic2- Motors and Cypress PSoC Microcontroller controlled my master RPi


Pic3-The RPi on the the Bot


Pic4-Obstacle distance measuring sensors



Pic4- RPi in close up 
 Pic5- Android App to control Pi-Bot (Early stages)



A short video of it in action-finding obstacles and navigating

 I will present more details on implementation in next post.

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