the quest for robots

On a previous post , I used the nrf24l01+ wireless chip to communicate between the Raspberry Pi and an Arduino, but only got lights to turn on. I remember being confused as to why servos would not work, and somewhat left it there. I started messing around with it again, and I am concluding that it might have been just a power issue. Here is the servo moving properly: The Arduino is on the ground due to the short length of the wires powering them. Just as a recap, what is happening is: - a C++ program using the RF24 library is compiled in the Raspberry Pi (connected to an nrf24l01+ chip) to broadcast a message. When executed, it will broadcast the message. - the Arduino (connected to another nrf24l01+ chip) programmed to receive messages receives the message, and upon receipt sends a signal to an Arduino that is wired to the servo to move the servo. Two separate Arduinos are used, as it seems that the servo library and the RF24 library do not seem to run properly toget

I've been wanting to dabble with Android development recently, and yesterday I realized that there is a Socket.IO client API available for Java/Android. The API is pretty straightforward, so I loaded a test Android project I had made for going through Android basics and connected to the OpenSesame Node server. and it works! I mean, the interface is non-existent and it's really just bare-bones, but having the servo respond through an Android application was pretty refreshing. (the web client and the android client "communicating" with each other--messaging is pretty much for debugging purposes)

Having been playing around with NodeJS recently,  I (naturally?) started re-writing some of the OpenSesame code using Node last night. I think I've only worked on it around 2 hours so far, but I've already set up a basic client interface (a socket.io chat tutorial rip) with a server that the Raspberry Pi can connect to and receive requests to open the door.  This is probably due to socket.io's socket management (socket.io is the WebSocket module for Node); for my first implementation, I had to manually write up a structure that managed sockets, but that is pretty much handled by socket.io. Also, the servo control logic is pretty much recycled (and the Raspberry Pi code is still Python), and I do remember spending some good time figuring that out.  Cool neverthelss. I'll probably keep both versions around.

The last couple of weeks have been quite refreshing. The drive for learning and trying out new things has never been higher. Currently fascinated with Node.js; Javascript truly isn't the make-a-website-pretty script I had known anymore.  Playing around with back-end and front-end frameworks. Currently playing around with Sails.js, and once I get used to that, I am looking forward to trying out Angular.JS as a front-end framework. Other than that, currently have couple of other random APIs (non-Node.js) I would like to play around with, but I'm just keeping them up in my browser tabs to that I'll get to them eventually. In addition, I reviewed the Android Developer tutorial again--hoping to try making something in that end as well.