I need a wifi controlled fourwheel car or tank tread car with a live camera to drive around my house. Something that if it turns over I can still drive remotely. I need reliability too.
I am somewhat impaired and this will give me some ease that all is as it should be in the other rooms. I live by myself.
This can be a kit or several kits or even a ready made thing.
I use only Android phones but would prefer a stand alone controller.
Also i might consider going bigger using a Nintendo and Mario car or similar. But would really prefer something with a controller I mg be able to program with additional capability like a Pi or that other thing.
These days a quadcopter camera drone is probably cheaper and easier to find.
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Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
An interesting challenge and a worthwhile project for someone, I'm sure. For now, I imagine some fixed cameras could be a good bridging solution? A Raspberry Pi ZeroW plus a Raspberry Pi camera and a wall plug; is that about ?40? So yeah, maybe not very cheap to have 5 or 6 of them in one or two corners in every room.
A set of strategically placed camera-equipped Pi Zero Ws would be a lot harder to crash than flying a drone or driving a vehicle round corners in a house, and may not be all that more expensive once to take the cost of the FPV[*] kit you'd need to fly or drive the drone/vehicle when its round the corner in another room or on another floor.
FPV = First Person View - the cameras and wifi transmitter on the vehicle and the screen or head-mounted display used by the operator to control the drone or vehicle.
Ok, if it tips over it's done for but there's still quite a community suppo rting it (at least when I last looked a few years ago). Similar to a roomba it can be auto-guided back to it's dock to charge etc, has audio and video . The dock plugpack died on me early on and I never bothered to replace it.
Private message me if you want it for the cost of shipping (I'm in Sydney, Australia).
I'm idly curious about cost and how big the thing is, i.e. is it big enough to go up or down a domestic staircase? Its size and weight aren't mentioned on that page.
I note also that its blurb says compatibility with a Windows or apple PC running IE6 (UGH!) Safari or Firefox but not, apparently, anything running Linux. Why? Is some dedicated control program required?
And last but not least, do you just drive it with the keyboard and mouse? I don't see any mention of any sort of specialised controller for it.
Most of the other drones and vehicles I've see have used a standard RC (Radio Contro) transmitter of, for the smaller, cheaper stuff, a dedicated transmitter with the normal set of RC control sticks and sliders.
I should have added that this makes it incompatible with an RPi, and the same consideration would apply to any other wheeled or flying robot that requires a dedicated program to convert user inputs into a command stream for it.
This is the basic advantage of drones etc that use a standard RC transmitter as the controller: you only need one Tx to control all your toys and, if they carry a camera, the odds are that they can all link to the same screen or head-mounted viewer.
The advent of wifi band (2.4Ghz) RC means that the receivers transmit to the transmitters for 'safe receipt' signals anyway, and now full backwards telemetry is available as well.....and the availability of mass produced chips in that band means that te real cost of RC kit has never been cheaper.
When I were a boy in the 1960s, a full 12 channel (six servo) reed set (12 semitones would vibrate a set of reeds like a music box, making
You can get an 8 channel digital set for half that.
Servos that were a tenner a time then, are a fiver a time today, and better...
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No Apple devices were knowingly used in the preparation of this post.
The point where reed set became affordable (I bought and assembled a Remcon Tx and Rx - you may remember them, but thre most advanced RC model I built and flew was a Bazz Bomb with an ED Racer on the front. I forget which receiver I used - one of the US made single channel units. That controlled a Japanese Royal escapement replacement. This was an electrically driven device, but still single channel: 'hold' to turn right until you took your thumb off the button, 'blip,hold' to turn left and 'blip,blip,blip' to tell a secondary escapement to move to its next setting. I used that to control the throttle, cycling from idle to full power, half-power and then back to idle.
Yes, I've noticed, but not used them for model flying: I switched tracks from RC to Free Flight before ever trying multi-channel RC. Free Flight suited me better and I stuck with that (mainly F1A glider and 1/2A power) until I started full-size gliding.
The view from inside a thermal looking down is much better than standing on the ground looking up.
You entirely missed my point: I was asking Chris if he knew why the maker of the Rovio three wheeler should specify the type of PC and the web browser required to control their vehicle.
Quite - but presumablr there's some sort of logic required to translate mouse clicks and drags into commands for the three wheeler - it could be a server somewhere, a chunk of Javascript or even a downloadable app, and the list of acceptable browsers and PC hardware would tend to point to the third option.
It's been quite a few years since I had it running so caveats re memory bla h blah...
IIRC there was a browser-based interface over WiFi which had a rudimentary manual control GUI (with audio & visual feeds from the device) but there wa s also some autonomy in that it could 'patrol' designated areas and, when n ecessary, return to it's charging dock. The compatibility specs were the mi nimum I suppose, and aimed at a non-technical market so maybe mention of Li nux was avoided to prevent scaring people off (?). A browser's a browser ri ght? :-P
There was no chance of climbing or descending stairs, the size of the devic e is comparable to a Roomba.
He actually is not specifiying anytthing. This shit was written by marketing, who haven't a clue of teh difference between a browser and an operating system. He knows the robot runs on MACIS 10.X and windows 9
3/4 and on three browsers that his tech team of one russian, downloaded from a pirate site .
His job is tow fold - one to convince you that the piece of shit will work so that you buy it - and two, to cover his arse so he can refuse to give you your money back when it doesn't.
You need to have worked for Clive Sinclair - sorry SIR Clive Sinclair,
understand the precise lines drawn by career criminals.
He neither knows not cares whether it works on Linux. The issue here is to cover the 90% of the market that is non linux and do it in such away that if it fails to work its because they haven't upgraded.
All of the above,
and
Not really. Put the server in the robot itself. Javascript in the web page IS the downloadable app.
See something I mocked up for an interface to an amplifier done over a web browser
formatting link
Webpages are good ways to build interactive interfaces between users and kit. Whether the web page is programmed, or the browser is programmed with java scripts is not really something that is of interest so long as the job gets done, these days with asynch call backs its really not useful to say where the 'app' resides. It split between the server and the client depending on which is most appropriate
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?People believe certain stories because everyone important tells them,
and people tell those stories because everyone important believes them.
Indeed, when a conventional wisdom is at its fullest strength, one?s
agreement with that conventional wisdom becomes almost a litmus test of
one?s suitability to be taken seriously.?
Paul Krugman
Ahh, you haven't lived until you find a 500fpm thermal at 900ft after pulling off due to the winch launch overspeed it caused, throwing a 180 and flying back down the runway into it. Then it just keeps getting better: 1300 fpm up going through 3,500 and then having to leave it sharpish at 4,500 while still climbing at 800fpm because the Stanstead CTA starts at 5,500.
Buzzards or kites? Lots of the latter in southern UK these days. For my money they are the best fliers of the lot.
town fairly low. They mainly seem to be used for the sort of job the RAF did with Lysanders in WW2.
Probably Russian or Polish, then. There are one or two Antonov AN-2 biplanes in the UK. One of then was based at Little Gransden for a while, but I haven't seen it recently. Could also be a PZL-104 Wilga - there are a few of them in the UK as well, one is based at Husband's Bosworth. Great glider tug, but fairly thirsty.
BTW, if you want to see a REALLY misbegotten aeronautical 'thing' take a look at the PZL M15 Belphegor:
I spent my early career in Cambridge avoiding working for either Uncle Clive or Herman and Chris - the two worst employers in the city. Early on I met Nick Toop who had the misfortune of working for both of them (largely responsible for the MK14 and the Atom).
Apocryphal (I hope) Sinclair quote "Can I have a new design team please I've broken the last one".
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Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
I think my last conversation with Clive was along the lines of 'I employ designers to make things work, not tell me why the laws of physics make it impossible'.
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The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to
rule.
? H. L. Mencken, American journalist, 1880-1956
That sounds like Clive - I still wish I'd had a camera at the Torch launch party though - the disco was hilarious with both Clive and Chris up there dancing (and not throwing punches at each other).
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Steve O'Hara-Smith | Directable Mirror Arrays
C:\>WIN | A better way to focus the sun
The computer obeys and wins. | licences available see
You lose and Bill collects. | http://www.sohara.org/
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