in the midst...

Philippians 2:10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11 And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. 12 Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. 13 For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure. 14 Do all things without murmurings and disputings: 15 That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world; 

Border Patrol

Running a new/longer mission and at the last minute, I decided to walk along with the rover as it would be out of contact with the ground station for a good portion of the trip. Almost to the home stretch without incident and I came up on a border patrol vehicle on a blind hill. They were very cooperative and were quite interested in what was going on. I jokingly told them I was working on a robot that could track illegals in the desert. Time to install the lidar for obstacle avoidance. 94,98,73,0,B

backing up...

Three tests in one today (actually 4 because I increased the rover speed to max for the crawler - .7mps to 1.0 mps). Tried out 3 features in the waypoints menu today - pause, reverse, and return to launch. Reverse was pretty tricky to figure out as setting it up was not intuitive at all. Made a mistake in the planning of one test and the rover continued the rest of a mission in reverse (it goes backward just as accurately as it does going forward). Return to launch from the last waypoint got it back to within 18 inches of the starting point. BTW - at "full speed", the rover still makes it around the block no problem. 90,95,75,0,B

Moonlight sonata

Once the sun goes down, I'm pretty much in for the night. But I really wanted to try a mission around the block after dark and I figured since the rover was going to do all the work, I should go ahead and just put it outside, set up the waypoints, and switch to "auto mode". I watched the mission from the comfort of my bed until the rover returned 20 minutes later. The Wyze Cam V3 does quite well with light from a nearly full moon. The rover just made it past a couple of plants that reached out to grab it. Probably time for some cable management before wires start getting yanked out of their sockets. 91,98,72,0,B

One of my father's favorite limericks:

There once was a young man from Sparta

Who was quite an elegant farta

He could fart anything

From God Save the King

To Beethoven's Moonlight Sonarta

Spot on...

I had noticed that the stock GPS that came with the Pixhawk kit I ordered from Ebay seemed to be off quite a bit. This made setting waypoint missions rather tricky as I had to try to compensate for the position inaccuracy depending on which direction the rover was set up to travel. Tried out a RadioLink GPS SE100 and out of the box it worked like a charm. Nice to see the rover know where it actually is. The old gps was accurate to within 2 meters and only picked up 11 satellites. The new gps is supposedly accurate to within .2 meters and picks up 20 satellites. As far as I could tell - it was pretty much spot on. 92,98,71,0,B

parts upgrade...

GPS & LIDAR

94,97,73,0,B

Improved turning authority..

Checking my new turning authority parameters. The rover's tracking during turns is pretty accurate now. (FF gain increased from the default setting of 0.2 to the max of 3.0) Once I get everything dialed in, I will be doing a detailed video of all my settings. Just got a new GPS and a lidar sensor for obstacle avoidance for more testing. 94,97,75,0,B