Making Cables with Pololu Crimper

When you first get into electronics, you buy the prestripped jumper wires. Then, you buy the jumper wires (perhaps in a variety of lengths) or maybe a spool of solid-core wire. Eventually, you get to the point when you want your cables of a certain length, color, perhaps even grouped together in a connector a certain way.

This can be done with a crimping tools, pins, and some wire. Not only that, it's cheaper in the long run to make your own cables. I've owned the Pololu crimping tool for quite some time but I never could get it to work. More to the point, I didn't know how to use it. The website had two pictures and that's it. No instructions came with the it. I made a video that will hopefully save someone from the same frustrations.

Things needed:
Pololu Crimper
Wire Strippers (Can be found at Radio Shack, Fry's, hardware stores, etc.)
~22AWG Wire (Solid core or stranded will do)
Female Pins and/or Male pins
Plastic Housings

Funny enough, I returned to the website today to find that they posted a video a month ago. For me, that's 11 months too late.

Raspberry Pi in NES Case

I have a Raspberry Pi acting as my media player to my TV. Seeing that I needed (or rather wanted) a case for it and I had 2 broken NES just lying around, I decided to give it a new home.

I was going to get panel-mounted connections for the ethernet and HDMI but those connectors alone would've easily been $10. I can't claim complete credit, I saw a video on YouTube where the guy essentially put the Pi in the back, right-hand corner and connected up to the Pi. Good enough for me.

Stellaris Launchpad: GPIO Mapping

Unlike the previous TI Launchpad, now referred to as MSP430 Launchpad, the Stellaris does not bring out all available IO to the user. It's based on a LM4F120H5QR, a 64-pin device, and the Launchpad brings out 40 pins.

I've mapped out the available IO below:

As you can see, there's only one port that has a full 8-bits available. So, plan your I/O well and look forward to a lot bit manipulation between the ports.

MRDS: Creation of Norris

Using Micosoft Robotics Development Studio (MRDS) to control the Lego Mindstorms kit is relatively easy. Although, their lack of documentation as far as input/output parameters and available functions makes it quite frustrating for someone who does have programming experience. Here's the block diagram of the finished program:

Meet Norris

The final product for the eWeek competition was Norris, inspired by Chuck Norris. Actually it was inspired by Team 1902 Exploding Bacon (FIRST Robotics). The point of the competition is to drive around a 2 level course, collecting the most colored balls and returning them to your homebase before time, about 3 minutes, expires. A street sweeper method was employed with this design and the robot kept the balls in its carrage rather than dropping off the balls at homebase every so often.

Inaugral Post: Lego Mindstorms and Microsoft Robotic Studio

For a competition at work to celebrate eWeek (National Engineers Week), we were given Lego Mindstorm kits and a task to design robots in order to navigate a course and collect objects. I thought this would be a great opportunity to test out Microsoft's Robotic Studio. It's a free application geared towards robotic development and simulation. It has built in support of various popular robots, including the Mindstorm kit. Also, it has a function for the Xbox controller.

My mechanical skills are lacking but the point of this is the software side. I took much inspiration from the building instructions on Lego's website for the Tribot, although, I didn't quite have all the pieces to build it, so some mods were required.

 
Unfortunately, the documentation from Microsoft is lacking and requires a lot patience and trial and error to determine what parameters are necessary. Hopefully, someone can skip the agony and learn something from my code. I'll post that in the next post.


I shot video of this landmark. The left thumbstick y-axis is used to control the left wheel and the right thumbstick for the right wheel:

The ending may be a fail but that's my lack of driving skills.