There has been no progress on the tank itself this week, but for the sake of completeness, here’s the slides from my talk yesterday at BarCamp Bournemouth. Sadly (thankfully?) I didn’t record any audio, so you’ll have to cope without the joy of listening to me attempting humour.
The room was so packed that someone elected to watch sat on the floor outside, which is always a good sign. The tank suffered performance anxiety and crapped out after a few minutes of autonomous operation, was controlled at least once by an audience member, and still–somehow–didn’t shoot me during the talk.
Here’s a few seconds of it under remote control courtesy of @ProactivePaul, which isn’t embedded here because TwitPic sucks.
And of course, everyone understood perfectly what was going on:
“They put a raspberry pie in a tank? An actual pie?” @tiff_gigg #shittiffsaid
— Adam Howard (@skattyadz) March 10, 2013
All in all, an awesome weekend. Thanks to everyone who attended my talk!
Comments
I just wanted to say I really enjoyed reading through your posts and am psyched up to try something like this myself. I just recently got my Pi and the tank project really peaked my interest!
Have you given up on any further enhancements to your project?
I notice you haven't posted any updates lately...
I haven't given up, I just have an acute shortage of free time! I used to work on the tank during my lunch hour, as it's not really practical for me to do it on evenings/weekends, but it's been about six months since I last had a lunch hour that I didn't have to work through :)
I have a number of plans in the short term, such as moving the pages served by lighttpd onto the mongoose server, which would get around the current cross-site Javascript problem on the web interface; improving the autonomous mode's behaviour; and upgrading the battery.
Longer term, I still hope to replace the RX-18 board with an Arduino and motor shields at some point, to allow fine-grained control of motor speeds.