ROV-Suite: Bottomside 1.1.0 Released

Great news!  I just uploaded the first revision of ROV-Suite's bottomside code to the repo and to the downloads page.  This new version supports a depth sensor, a voltage sensor and a digital compass.  Please note that while the libraries have been used (my robotics team used those very libraries to get 3rd place in the MATE ROV competition) and tested, the entire setup has not been tested yet.  Since it is late here tonight, I'll do some bench top testing tomorrow.  

Here's the setup:

Compass (HMC6352) hooked up to the Arduino's A4 and A5 (I2C) pins.

Voltage sensor (Phidgets P1135) hooked up to the Arduino's A1 analog input pin

Depth sensor* (Phidgets P1115) hooked up to the Arduino's A2 analog input pin

Now the depth sensor's setup is a little tricky at first, but it is really robust in practice.  In fact, in our testing, we found that the library was accurate to within a centimeter!  Since the P1115 is really just an air pressure sensor, you must use the water to compress a volume of air that must then compress the pressure sensor.

The flexible diaphragm is pushed inwards (towards the P1115) as the water pressure increases.  That causes the volume of air inside the sealed container to decrease, and since the container is sealed, the pressure then increases.  From there, the P1115 reads the absolute air pressure inside the sealed container and converts that to a depth reading.  I will admit, this is not my design.  A mentor on the team, Jay Isaacs, came up with it.  The only downfall of this setup is the maximum depth of the pressure sensor (as it can only have 36 PSI atmospheric on it, only 21.3 PSI of water pressure can be applied before it exceeds it's maximum pressure rating).  According to some calculations with the help of Engineering Tool Box, it's maximum depth is 49.2 feet of water.

I hope to test out this code more fully soon so that I can catch any bugs it's hiding.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris Konstad

Update

I have some great news regarding Monterey and Android!  With the help of Stack Overflow, I've gotten SDL to almost compile and work with a Qt application on Android.  Now I'm just missing the compiled library to link to (my compiling is spitting out undefined reference errors).  Once I can get that sorted out, you can expect a fully functional version of Monterey for Android!

Also, I've been spending some of my programming time recently working on an application for a med school student that I'm working with at a hospital near my house (I'm volunteering there).  I'm writing an application for him that will detect the coordinates of a touch on the screen of an Android (and hopefully soon, iOS) phone, log those coordinates for multiple tests on multiple planes of the hand and integrate all of the data to find out the volume of space that the patient's thumb can move in (this will help patients with congenital thumb hypoplasia).  My application is based on the proof of concept technique the med school student figured out using an iPhone drawing program and MATLAB.  Hopefully, my application will simplify the process and make it practical to use in a clinical environment.  What I'm getting at here is that development of Monterey will be slowed down a little bit for the time being due to other commitments, although this application will be completed before the end of summer (so then I will have more time to spend on ROV-Suite)!

Also, since I'm on summer vacation, I'm spending some time playing around with fun side projects that I've been meaning to get setup for quite a while now.  I finally installed Linux on my Core 2 Quad desktop that I built in the 8th grade, so it's a nice little Samba file server on my home network, now.  I've since set up SSH (something I've been wanting to play around with for awhile) and I hope to turn my desktop into a remote compiler and backup solution for my computer.  My goal is to set up cross compilation on it so that I can write my programs in OSX, and then automatically compile them for Linux and Windows (and even Android) after I push the update to my Git repo.  I find having to reboot my laptop just to compile a Windows build kind of annoying (especially when I have all of my reference windows open in Chrome), so this should be fun to try out!

On a final note, I've noticed that ROV-Suite has been getting some negative feedback on Sourceforge (people have been not recommending it).  Obviously, if you think that ROV-Suite deserves the negative feedback, then go ahead and give it a thumbs down.  But please, if you do so, comment on why.  I really enjoy working on ROV-Suite and I want to make it the best suite of applications possible, but I can only do so if I am told what is wrong with it.  If you find any bugs, please make a ticket!  I will get back to those tickets as soon as I can!

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris K

Minor Setbacks

I have some semi-bad news (luckily it's not too bad)!  First off, I downloaded an IP camera app for my iPhone, and while trying to get it to work with Qt, I realized something: I don't know how to get the data from the IP camera chips that Nick and I are planning to include on the official ROV-Suite PCB!  I'll need to find out how the data is sent from the chips (jpg, mjpg, etc) before I can continue development on Bodega (the piloting GUI).

Also, I ran Monterey through Doxygen today and I was shown that I don't know how to properly add the comments and information in my code.  So I'll be spending some time adding more Doxygen information in my Monterey code soon.  That will, of course, delay the distribution of the Doxygen documentation.

That completes the bad news for today.  Luckily these are only minor issues!

On a side note, if any Android developers are out there and willing to help out with ROV-Suite, I'd love to have an Android service that reads USB joysticks and sends the values of the axes, buttons and hats over UDP to localhost.... Just saying. ;)  You can contact me in the comments if you are willing to help out!

Thanks!

Chris

Monterey 2.0.2Beta

Great news!  Monterey 2.0.2 Beta has just been released on OSX and Windows!  You can find the binaries here.  The update is fairly minor.  The biggest and most important change is the auto updating (well, mostly auto).  Now, when there is an updated version of Monterey, you will alerted by Monterey and it will provide you with a download link.

Thanks to the Fervor library for making this possible!

Thanks for stopping by and don't forget to update!

Chris Konstad

Monterey: Updater

(images from the author of the Fervor updater library)

I love adding new features to ROV-Suite to make it the best application for driving ROVs that you can find. I really do.  Since most of the base functionality is down (I still need to work on IP camera support and more debugging options), I'm starting to play around with new libraries to add useful features.  For instance, I'll be adding a library soon (shown above) that will alert the user when a newer version of Monterey is available and it will show the user a download URL.  I've been looking at the download numbers at ROV-Suite's SourceForge page, and it looks like most people aren't updating their older versions of Monterey to the latest version.  Maybe it's because they grabbed it early and used the Dropbox link that I put out, or maybe they just haven't checked back in with the project yet.  Either way, by adding this updater (which can be disabled from the preference pane), the user will be alerted to any newer versions, which often include bug fixes and awesome new features!

In other news, ROV-Suite has been well past the 100 downloads mark (56ish due to NetworkingTest alone) for quite a while now.  Monterey is pulling close to that threshold with 80 downloads so far (as of today)!  I'm looking forward to posting about the 100th download of Monterey which I have a feeling will be pretty soon!

Also, I'm not sure if I mentioned this already or not, but the early version of the bottomside software is already on the SourceForge page!  You can view it in the repo here.  Since it's a fairly simple setup, I'm not going to put it in the downloads page.  I'll start doing that later when I have a bunch of 3rd party libraries included with it.

If you have used Monterey to drive an ROV already or if you have any feedback, please let me know!  I'd love to post a quick blog entry with photos and a story or two. And, as always, feedback is very welcomed!

Thanks!

Chris K

Edit:  Apparently there have been 92(!) downloads of Monterey at Softpedia!

NetworkingTest on Google Play!

Great news!  I finally got Networking Test out on Google Play!  It took some learning on my part, but I finally found out how to use layouts properly to make a fully scalable GUI using QWidgets.  The desktop versions of NetworkingTest will be receiving that feature soon (on Windows and OSX).  I'm really happy to have consolidated the codebase for the Android and desktop versions!  Now features and bugs that are fixed for one version don't have to be replicated for the other version.  

You can find the Android version on Google Play for $1.00.

As a side note, today Nick, Alex and I etched a circuit board (to make own our Arduino) using nothing but muriatic acid and hydrogen peroxide.  It turned out great!  I'd post some pictures of it but Alex has them.  I'll upload some later.

Thanks for stopping by!

Chris K

Update: Monterey v2.0.1Beta (Windows)

Just an update to let you know that the Monterey v2.0.1Beta for Windows is up in the Sourceforge downloads page.  You can find that here.

Thanks for checking it out!

Chris K