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