Tag: arduino

Here a small presentation that I have prepared for our students so that they can learn how to program modular snake robots.

In 2011, when I started assisting Professor Houxiang Zhang in teaching the Mechatronics course at Aalesund University College (AAUC), I proposed a new idea which, at that time, I was not totally aware of its power. I proposed to introduce the use of Open Hardware and Open software platforms for teaching. Professor Zhang supported my idea. It was the beginning of a small revolution.

Some of my students had some troubles when using the PmodACL accelerometer sensor with the I2C protocol to communicate with Processing. Basically, from time to time the accelerometer sends some extra information concerning the state of the I2C channel. From the Processing side, we need to clean up and ignore these extra data before parsing the information. Also, from time to time, it seams that not all the values are transmitted by the accelerometer. Here a possible solution.

This is a nice application project that I like to show to my students in order to trigger and give them some more motivation. It is a a project that I developed when I was a Msc student at the University of Siena. An iPhone is used to control the robot. Data coming from the iPhone's accelerometer are send to a server through Open Sound Control serial messages. When the server receives these messages, it applies inverse kinematics and calculates the joint angles' values. Finally, these angles