11 replies to this topic

[Chris Harrod]

Overall Goal: To create a netduino controlled turret system to fire nerf darts or other items of my choosing at my wife if she comes into my office.

Background: I have absolutely zero development, electrical/mechanical engineering experience. I do have a lot of disposable time and income to toss around and want to test my ability to learn new things. Learning new things is the real goal of this experiment.

Plan: Using the Kinect's SDK and wireframe tracking ability, write a C# application to track the X/Y/Z positions of a person entering the device's field of view. Specifically the center of mass. Use this data to magically talk to the Netduino over ethernet. Ideally, I'd like to quickly send the X/Y/Z of the target to the Netduino and have it move stepper motors to reposition the turret. This is obviously a long ways away from what I can do now.

Progress: Dec 2011, I've acquired my Netduino / Kinect / some small servos. I've pieced together an application to echo out the X/Y/Z of the center of the target. I've also written a shabby little app to move a servo in a wiper fashion just to see if I could do it. My total coding experience is probably 2 weeks at this point.

Basically I'd like this thread to turn into a blog of my progress of both the project and my experience of learning how to develop without formal education.

Update: Sept, 2012

I took a few months off because I was slammed with personal stuff. Back to it!

I had a hard time with the communication part of this because I was flooding the Netduino with as many as 30 requests a second. With the assistance on Arron Chapman I was able to reduce the overhead on the communication by using sockets and just sending small bits of binary rather than a bunch of GET or POST requests.

I started working on the turret itself tonight while I wait for parts from sparkfun.

I still need some gears or timing pulleys for the steppers themselves.


Parts List (so far):

Netduino Plus: $60
Stepper Motors x 2: $48
Big Easy Driver x 2: $46
Terminals x Many: $15
Lazy Suzan: $5
Lots of wire: $25


(I'll solidify this later)
Multimeter
Voltage Regulators
Resistors
Capacitors
Soldering iron / solder / desoldering braid
DreamCheeky USB missile launcher I used for a prototype

Learning Resources: (complete this)

1) Electrical Engineering
- Ohms Law

2) Mechanical Engineering
- Gears, Pulleys

3) C# Programming
- LearnVisualStudio.NET

4) Projects I learned from
- Brady Gaster - Kinect Netduino

5) People that assisted!

[James Maeding]

Overall Goal: To create a netduino controlled turret system to fire nerf darts or other items of my choosing at my wife if she comes into my office.

Background: I have absolutely zero development, electrical/mechanical engineering experience. I do have a lot of disposable time and income to toss around and want to test my ability to learn new things. Learning new things is the real goal of this experiment.

Plan: Using the Kinect's SDK and wireframe tracking ability, write a C# application to track the X/Y/Z positions of a person entering the device's field of view. Specifically the center of mass. Use this data to magically talk to the Netduino over ethernet. Ideally, I'd like to quickly send the X/Y/Z of the target to the Netduino and have it move stepper motors to reposition the turret. This is obviously a long ways away from what I can do now.

Progress: Little. I've acquired my Netduino / Kinect / some small servos. I've pieced together an application to echo out the X/Y/Z of the center of the target. I've also written a shabby little app to move a servo in a wiper fashion just to see if I could do it. My total coding experience is probably 2 weeks at this point.

Basically I'd like this thread to turn into a blog of my progress of both the project and my experience of learning how to develop without formal education.

dang, then switch out the nerf for taser gun leads and you have some serious security.
or figure out the height of the person and match it to a lookup list to guess the name, then issue a message to that person from God in hidden speakers.

[Chris Harrod]

Just a brief update. I haven't had a chance to work on this because I had a family member pass away this week. Anyways, I have been thinking of a solid way to have the netduino communicate with the PC / Kinect via numberous get requests to the PC. Initially I thought of hosting the server on the netduino but after some testing, I saw I could only do a few requests a second before the device was overloaded and started erroring out. What does the community think the best way to approach this would be? I need to have the PC tell the netduino where the target is at a very high rate of speed.

[Chris Harrod]

I just found that a gentleman named Brady Gaster has done a lot of the legwork for a very similar idea. https://github.com/b...trolledNetduino

[Nevyn]

Anyways, I have been thinking of a solid way to have the netduino communicate with the PC / Kinect via numberous get requests to the PC. Initially I thought of hosting the server on the netduino but after some testing, I saw I could only do a few requests a second before the device was overloaded and started erroring out.

What does the community think the best way to approach this would be? I need to have the PC tell the netduino where the target is at a very high rate of speed.

Interesting that the PC/Kinect to Netduino has come up as I will be playing with this over the Christmas break. Personally I was going to use a Mini and a Bluetooth module. I wanted a wireless connection and this seemed the obvious choice to me as you get Bluetooth installed on laptops these days. I'll drop another reply in here over the Christmas break to let you know what sort of performance I get.

Thanks for the link to the project on Github.

Regards,
Mark

[Chris Harrod]

I'll be working on it a bit today while I watch football / screaming at the TV. I'll let you know what progress I make.

[Chris Harrod]

I know it's been a long time since I've updated this or even worked on the project, but anyways...

I gotten most of webserver code as well as the Kinect application done. The kienct application sends information via post request to the netduino.

I'm ready to start adding stepper motors to this.

Drivers: here

Motors: here

Any thoughts of concerns about going this route?

[inxtremo]

Any thoughts of concerns about going this route?

Hey, i have the similar devices running here. No problems so far. They move a mechanical pant/tilt device with a camera connected. The power of the stepper are ok for that.

Greetings,
Daniel

[Chris Harrod]

FYI: For those of you doing any stepper motor work and are looking for gears / pulley systems this seems like a good resource. https://sdp-si.com/eStore/

[Chris Harrod]

Also I'd like to say thanks to Arron Chapman for spending quite a bit of time to teach me programming sockets. Without him I wouldn't have gotten fast and lightweight communication between the PC application and the Netduino Plus figured out.

[Chris Harrod]

Just a quick update video. I fried a stepper motor driver shortly after this video. Tonight I decided to move away from stepper motors and move to high torque servos. I'll use the steppers for some other yet to be imagined project.

[Chris Walker]

Very cool, Chris. I love seeing the sensor data turning into action Looking forward to your next video update, Chris