Yesterday I finished Part 1-alpha of this project!
What is part 1?
The first part of this project is a server interface running on a raspberry Pi which will render a control dashboard that streams video from the tank and has controls for the user to move the tank around. Part1-alpha is not quite part one, because I only have the base drive system built. Eventually I the control panel will include controls for the arm, claw, and drive tracks. But for now I just think its cool to have a video streaming tankbot.
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| Screenshot of the dashboard |
Video Streaming
I used the motion library to stream video. Motion is designed as more of a security system application and initially the video stream was very poor (laggy). I did some research and found that motion saves jpgs every so often. After disabling that, the video stream improved enough to where you could drive the tankbot purely using the video feed. I also set some configs to lessen the quality of the video to improve the response time.
Dashboard
The dashboard is build with bootstrapped html, with a simple image tag that streams the video. Buttons connected through sockets control the motors of the tank.
Serial Communication
Im using the serialport npm library to comunicate with the arduino
System
The system comprises mainly two parts: a state machine running on the arduino, and a simple nodeJS server running on a raspberry Pi. The arduino listens for an incoming byte and performs the instructed action based on the received byte:
- forward
- reverse
- left
- right
- stop
The nodeJS server renders a simple html page on a get request, which includes a basic javascript script that emits commands through the use of sockets. The nodeJS server will receive those commands and send an appropriate byte to the arduino.
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