Control a vex with a laptop?

[antiNeo]

I mounted my laptop to the Vex, and it works great! Here's a picture:



I used that Perl script to control it and I used an app called Linphone to look through the webcam. As a test I drove the robot down the hall to see if the bathroom was occupied. Seeing that it wasn't with the webcam, I proceded to get off my chair and utilize it.

The one thing I don't really like about it is the way I strapped the laptop on. It didn't fall off, but it's still a bit shaky. I should probably also find a better approach to controlling the robot too, probably with a leaner protocol and a service running on the laptop like seanwitte suggested.

I might even make a video... although I'm not very good at making stuff like that. I'd like to see that webcam attached to the arm... I wish I could have done something like that. The idea reminds me of a robot I saw that one of our team sponsors had built. It had a camera on this neat arm that would telescope out like ten or fifteen feet in the air. It was cool.

[seanwitte]

On my way to work I remembered this: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/1453

I wrote that a few years ago for rapid prototyping on the min-RC. We didn't have an RC radio for it so I wrote an app for the PC to provide a UI to drive the robot using the serial port. I don't know whether it will work with the Vex, but the RC code is pretty simple. It provides 4 2-axis joysticks (widgets you drive with the mouse) and 8 digital inputs. The robot can send back sensor data. It will also plot I/O channels for you.

If you can get a remote desktop or application sharing program to work over the internet then you could just remote into the laptop and drive it using that UI.

[antiNeo]

I added an arm to my robot. It really seems like a robot now. Picking up things with the arm and the webcam is great fun.

I updated my Perl code to use my left joystick for single stick drive and my right joystick to control the arm. As far as I can tell, my PSX controller works as well as the controllers that come with the Vex. I also added some simple timeout detection code that just sends out a '\a' character every second. My code is still event driven, so it doesn't waste bandwidth by sending motor values when nothing has changed.

And I've sort of started working on a video for it... I've chosen the background music at least.