Samsung Galaxy S2 plus

Had an interesting encounter with this mobile phone. I bought one in April and right from the start it started to reboot itself everytime I was on the way and using internet. When I per example wanted to browse the internet during my ride to work (with the train), the phone rebooted itself. This kind of behaviour was looping until I stayed static in one place. I concluded that it has something to do with the changing of the base antennas. I sent the phone 4 time to the warranty reparation, each time it was supposed to be fixed, yet the problem remained. You can immagine how happy it made me. Everytime I wanted to use the navigation on the phone (online one) the phone was just resetting itself. The people working in the repair shop said they cannot test it outside, as it is forbidden to take the clients phones anywhere.

 

Yesterday I realized, that this happens only with the Swiss Orange network. After I bought a sunrise prepaid version, the trouble was suddenly gone. Tommorrow I will go to the local orange shop and try make things straight!

Atmel Car V0.1

As promised, I will continue today. Yesterday I mentioned about the projects that I would be doing. Today I will describe what was already done and what are the next steps.

So far, I’ve bought a simple remote controlled car, disassembled it, removed the original circuit. Then I used two external servo motors, took their circuit, and connected it to the electro motors in the car. I screwed the Atmel research board on the “trunk” of the car and mounted a bluetooth module on roof.  I also connected the modules between each other. 

• Front wheels on the PIN PD7
• Back wheels on the PIN PB3
• Bluetooth module BT0417C works over UART standard so I plugged it to PD0 (Tx) and and PD1 (Rx) on Atmel MCU.

Assembled everything again. I am really sorry for the bad pictures but I have a supplementary phone which is not the best machine in the world :).

I also wrote a short “dummy” projects which steers the car in a random way. So every 2 seconds the speed and direction of the car changes. Everything so far easy and simple, but it still takes some time.

The next step that awaits me is to define a standart that will help me get the data from the Phone to the MCU and the other way around. I thought of something like a aJSON or jsmn, do not know yet.

And the most important thing, start programming the Android. I do not know why, but I never managed to come further as “hello world” with the template that is already made for you in the Android SDK.

Stay tuned

 

 

Comeback

Hello everybody

After a year, I will post a text again. This blog was started around a year ago to make a breakthrough to the business world. Yet I was quite busy, sometimes lazy and afterwards the priorities shifted far from this blog. In the mean time I settled nicely in Switzerland, living, working in IT, specifically electronic financial transactions (EFT). I am also trying to enjoy life. Life is good 🙂

However, the fall is slowly coming, with it also short days, bad weather and similar. It is because of this that I want to renew the writings. The equipment ordered last year was still waiting for me, it even grew some, so I decided to start working on a project. Unfortunately only after I assembled the hardware together I decided to post the project details here. Because of this there is not steps of what but just the assembled piece. Still, I will try to catch every next step (mostly SW build), here.

Ok, let’s get down to business.

I am making a very simple remote-controlled car with a BT remote controller. The remote is going to be an android user interface on a phone. I want to also use the gyroscope and accelerator chip, to make it working. I have available 2 different car models, firs is a simple remote-controlled car with two servo motors. I am also using an Atmel atmega32L as the brain of operation (Check the post from last year). After the software on the car is done I am going to try to make a user interface application to control the car.

Finally I am going to transfer everything to a bigger car with a brush-less motor, more power, more speed. I am going to include to the new car its own GPS receiver its own Gyro for stability. It is going to be powered by Atmel128L or even Netduino with its ARM processor (never tried C# in embedded programming). I hope I can manage to finish the projects until new year.

This week I am going to put some more effort, later on I will work on rainy, grey, cloudy days. I hope I can make it. Wish me luck, the ones that actually managed to read my texts :).

In the next post I am going to describe a detailed use of hardware + publish some software, that will be written till then.

Cheers

First Atmel-BT app

Hello everybody
First I would like to mention I still decided for Atmel128A as I like the low level, register mashing, fuse setting style better. It seems more real, more man :).  As i stil suffer from an actual Arduino phone, I connected the atmel to the computer. Now I started to use Eclipse with AVR plugin, which I like much more than the official Atmel Studio (4 and 6).

So, the idea. Microcontroler is has a servo that needs to be controlled wirelessly. For this cause I made a a very simple application on the PC  with some help of C# and WPF :). The app establishes a connection over a  bluetooth serial port and communicates with Atmel. So when I press the button left the servo goes left and when I press right the servo goes right. I shot a simple video to demonstrate. Later I am going to skectch the circuit and post some source.

The equipment has arrived!!

Finally, all the equipment that I wanted arrived. I waited much more than I expected, as it took to bring me the Atmel128 almost a month. Usually the stuff from China and HK came in a week or 10 days. But ok, its here. The list of new stuff that I have goes as follows:

• Atmel Atmega128A Micro controller from LC studio (LCSsoft). Using also AVR studio 4 or 6, didn’t decide yet.
• Wireless Bluetooth TTL transceiver Module ( RF-BT0417C)
• USBASP programmator
• USB to TTL converter
• A small simple breadboard
• A soldering machine with different irons
• A lot of cables for assembling
• Shrink tubes
• Digital multimeter

Still missing, but it can wait:

• Netduino microcontroller (www.netduino.com), bought it just because I was anxious to see how this works
• Another 2 Wireless Bluetooth transceivers
• Android phone like HTC Desire or similar

Goal is to make an Wireless controlled model car(boat, even plane or chopper), steered simply by   integrated magnetomer on Android phone. The micro controller programming I can do, mobile apps, not yet, but working on that too ;).  I know these stuff exist already, but sowhere I have to start, and this here is it.

Yesterday I already soldered the cables to Bluetooth, (TX and RX, as well as VCC and GND). I know it doesnt look preety, but it works. I used this solder yesterday for the first time so I will need some time to get used to that. Today, when the rest of the equipment arrived, I tested the BT over USB to TTL converter and it worked perfectly from the beginning! Yeah, the first time something like this ever happened to me.

The next step is to connect the micro-controller with the computer and try to communicate.  As I am still making the Live Casino project I have to focus some time today on this too.

Till next time!

Matija

Edit: Later today, somehow, even the Netduino came. Now I can still decide weather I want to do my project in plain C or in a higher OOP C#. As I have some (alot) of code already written in C I think this could be it. Maybe I should first do the differences between Atmel Atmega and Atmel ARM (NetDuino). And then also C and C#. Ah, I will see.

Hello gente :)

Hey!
Apropriatelly, first things first, my name is Matija. I’m from a small little country of Slovenija, which lays on place where east meets west,  and north meets south. I moved recently to Switzerland, as the faith guided me there.

Why did I start to write the blog? Especially for me and myself. I would like to have a journal of my own, diary that shows me where am I, what am I doing and where am I going. This blog will be mostly dedicated to my life and work that I do in a certain moment. My life is currently on a crossroad, as I recently finished formal education and still trying to get the first (real) job.  Since June I am officially an Engineer of Computer and Information science. As I like programming more and more I decided to do some home projects. During the workflow of a certain project I will try to explain it,  document it with pictures and describe how I made it, toghether with source code. Currently I am using VS 2010 for PC applications and AVRS 6.0 for microcontroller applications (which I like more :-)). Beside that I will show you new tricks from my dog and other events from my life. I hope you would enjoy it.