Have the Balancebot up and running and everything is working well.
Two questions for anyone out there who has completed this project:
(1) How did you keep your HDMI connected to the robot during the initial “launch” portion of the project (IR red/blue button)? Perhaps I have my brick slightly skewed, but currently my HDMI connection is blocked by one of the legs. Or are you just launching the code, removing the hdmi and then proceeding on?
(2) Is there an easy way to add new or alter the existing code to “stream” the raspberry pi camera via the shared wi-fi (similar to browserbot code)?
I did two things to solve both of these problems (by cheating).
(1) I skewed the brick a bit to the left to make space for the HDMI… it’s still a tight fit but I can plug and unplug without having to deconstruct the unit. For a longer term solution for these types of problems in the future there are 90/270 adapters on amazon that will also work.
(2) I made a little “holder/rack” for my iphone on the front of the unit, by the IR sensor. You can then use either facetime or other software (I use my iwatch) for a live video stream. This is sort of a lowbrow solution but it accomplishes the same task.
Personally I use SSH, or occasionally the browser-based VNC, for my connection to the robot. I almost never connect a monitor or TV to any Raspberry Pi.
If you are developing on Windows, try using something like Putty to SSH into the robot. Alternatively, if the robot is running Raspbian for Robots, you can connect to it through your computer’s browser (navigate to the IP address of the robot, or dex.local ).
Thank you for that information. I will look into the browser-based VNC. Currently I do all the coding within the console on Raspbian but if I could use VNC to essentially remote into this screen that would be idea for many reasons.
Is there a reason why VNC is absolutely required? You can do it with a VNC, but then there’s going to be a huge delay until the characters get printed in the shell, there are visual artifacts and it’s quite cumbersome.
If all you’re doing is shell work, then I highly suggest you just SSH into it and do all the work within the terminal. That’s what SSH was intended for.
