Saturday, January 30, 2010

Site move

I just finished my personal website, hscott.net. I have all of my projects documented on there including the barbie rover. If you use the new site, you can leave comments on stuff and I've updated a couple pages. The website is still a work in progress and I'll continue updating and tweaking it. If you have any suggestions or complaints (something doesn't work, slow loading, etc) then please email me so I can fix it. Here's the link straight to the rover page on the new site:
http://hscott.net/projects/barbie-rover/

I'll keep the old site up for a while until I make sure there aren't any problems with my new site, and then I'll make it redirect.

The rover project is not dead or complete. I got a beta version of brand new software for it done over winter break, but school keeps me too busy to work it during the regular semester. Once I finish it and get it to where I like it, I'll post it. Here's a peek at some new features it has:

-keyboard support. you can now use WASD in your browser to control the rover like in a video game
-improved rocket launcher interface. You now need "launch codes" to fire the rocket. It also launches on a new window and has an improved control set.
-support for new sensors and hardware for the arduino

planned features:
-mobile support. A separate page will let you control the whole rover on an iPhone or any internet enabled cell phone
-rocket trajectory calculations. Based on where the launch tube is, you will be able to see approximately where the rocket will land.
-better wifi stuff. I'll go into detail later.
-diagnostics. Before a rocket launch or before driving it, you can run a diagnostic test that will query several sensors to test lots of stuff like battery level, computer status, motors, arduino, etc. Any warnings or failures will be reported for better debugging.

I'll keep updating here and we should hopefully be working on the rover over spring break and over the summer. We've also got some other interesting projects in the works, so check my new site hscott.net for details on those.