Installing switches, buttons, and indicator lights.

While I was waiting for a replacement motherboard, I decided to work on adding some switches and what not to the back of the tank.

First off I was cleaning up my wiring and making things nice and neat when I started to consider where I was gonna put all the switches etc. I realized that my mounting board was going to have to be modified or else I could never fit all the switches in, and even if I did, I could never get the board out without pulling out every LED and switch I installed.


So I had to yank out the mounting board and modify it.


I removed a notch that would end up being the place for the mobo LED's and removed the two 'wings' that filled the gap toward the back of the tank. I had to take those off because they would have sat under the switches and stuff and made it impossible to remove the board without first removing the switches.

Let me tell you, this was a HUGE pain in the ***. I wish I had accounted for it before, because I had to take all kinds of crap apart to get it back out and then modify it.

Now that I had that taken care of, on to the switches etc.

Master Power Switch
When it was off, the power line to the batteries and 12V jack was broken, however it did not break the connection of the 12V jack and batteries, so the batteries would still charge off the jack when the main power switch was off.
When this switch is off nothing has power.

Motor Controller Power Switch
This broke the power to the motor controller in the front of the tank. This would allow me to work on the tank and not have to worry about the thing running away on me.

Servo Controller Power Switch
This one is a little tricky. The Servo controller doesn't run off of 12V. I't is a 5-6V system. Instead of adding its own DC-DC voltage regulator, I just ran it off of the power supply that runs the motherboard. If you don't know it, PC power supplys give 5V(red lines) and 12V(yellow lines).
So the switch is simple in that it just breaks power to the servo controller from the motherboard power supply, but tricky in that the motherboard supply has to be on to give power to the servo controller. Not that big of a deal really.


Here is an image of the switches installed.


Next, I needed to install indicator lights for the Motor Controller, and Servo Controller switches. The Master Power Switch has its own built in light.

The two LED's had to be connected correctly with the switch and then resistors added. Unlike lamps, LED's don't have built in resistors, and you must be mindful of polarity.


I put the resistors inline with the wire just behind the LED.


Then I covered them up with some heatshrink.


Next I drilled holes and mounted some LED holders. The plastic was way to thick for them to catch right so I had to modify them and glue them in place.


Here they are mounted etc.




Now as mentioned before, the Servo Controller has no power unless the motherboard is on. Since I had no motherboard, how did I power up the power supply to test the light?
Like this..


To power an atx power supply simply short the green wire on the motherboard connector to ground.

Motherboard Power Button
This is just a momentary switch that turns on the motherboard. It connects to the built in pins of the motherboard itself.

Motherboard Reset Button
Same as above, just a momentary switch that connects to the reset pins of the motherboard.

These two switches were very straight forward, just drilled the hole and mounted them. Again, I yanked the wires from old computer hookups and wired them to the switches I got at Radio Shack. The green button will be replaced with a red one.

Power on and HDD Activity
These were just straight forward LED's that I actually yanked from an old computer someplace (I have a huge box full). They connected to the pins made for them on the motherboard. I didn't have to add resistors here because that was taken care of on the motherboard.

Here is an image from the inside view where LED sockets mounted. This is what the gap in the mounting board was made for.


Here they are mounted inside and outside views.

C1 = You are screwed.

FYI a POST code for Award BIOS of "C1" means that there is a memory error.



So if you know your memory is good and that its seated correctly, then you know your board is bad.

:(

Thankfully the guys at mini-Box (buy stuff from them!) answered my email prompty with instructions on how to get a return. They answered email on a saturday too!

I was sooo looking forward to having this thing up and running this weekend.

Internal tank mods -or- I am a dremel Ninja

First thing I did was remove the fan and heatsink from the RDFR speed controller. It really wasnt needed now since the motors were so small and it was big, noisy, and power hungry.



Next thing I had to do was remove the old battery compartment that was attached to the upper hull. It normally would have rested right on top of where I was planning on mounting the motherboard. Since I wasn't going to use it for anything, I just lopped it off.


I did make a small mistake here. The upper hull gained considerable strength from the battery compartment. I cut too close to the top of the hull and removed all of that strength. I should have left about an inch or two below the top of the hull. The cuts are highlited in red to make it easier to see.



Next I measured and cut the rear compartment riser to fit the motherboard. There was a ledge at the very rear of the inside of the hull that I wanted the moatherboard's mount to rest on. I planned on using a piece of plywood to rest across these parts so I would have something for the motherboard to mount to. The ledge is highlighted with yellow and the cut is highlighted in red.


Here is the first piece of plywood that I cut for the board mount. It worked ok untill I realized I had made it too small from front to back to fit the motherboard. I had to toss it, but I realized that I would be much better off making a single plywood piece that covered the entire inside of the hull. I would cut out spaces for the batteries etc.


This time I measured things a little more carefully.


It fit quite well on the first cut, I had to do some sanding on the sides where the batteries went so that they fit a little better. Not to mention tons of dremel work to get the bottom of the bay smooth. It had pegs etc from the old electronic's mounts.


Here is what it looks like with the batteries installed. Perfect fit. The four dots you see on the plywood are the locations for the motherboard risers.


At this point I did a ton of measuring and marking and cut out the slot for the motherboards rear panel. Let me tell you, this was a huge pain in the ass. I had to measure it and get it right to about 1/32 of an inch. To top it off I had no good way of cutting the stuff. You just can't get a good straight edge with the dremel, and my jig saw couldnt fit back there. I ended up taking my jig saw's foot off and doing most of it with that, but I cut my hole small and used a file to widen it as needed.


All the hard work paid off though. It fit pretty well in the end.


View from the back. Awesome.


Here it is with the board mounted and the motherboard risers mounted on the board. The moment of truth approaches, will it fit?


Thankfully it fit just right. I wasn't kidding about the dremel ninja skills.


Case modders, eat your heart out!


Here is a shot of all it fitting together inside the bay. The markings you see between the battery are where I screwed a wooden block under the plywood board to bridge the gap between the plywood and the bottom of the hull.



Next I mounted the RDFR in the front compartment. After I spent time making it look nice and pretty, I realized I needed to put it behind the motors or else the control wires wouldn't reach the SV203. Also, with that front part open, it will make a nice little spot for a camera or grabber arm or something.


Meanwhile Alyssa was being helpful by fixing an old mobile phone she found in my bits box.


I also added a power jack in the back to make recharging the batteries easy without having to remove the cover etc. I just need to find a 12V power adapter that can push enough juice to power the thing and charge the batteries at the same time.



Here is the final layout, I just need to clean up the wiring.

(click image for full size version)

Parts came in today.

Wooo!!!


Once again, big thanks to mini-Box for the great service and discounts.


Here is a good image to give you an idea of the scale of things. The ITX board is 6.5 by 6.5 inches. It should fit just about anywhere inside the tank bays. The problem with the tank is that the inside is sectioned off by inner walls. This gives the body some stength but gets in my way.



My fist step was to get the board up and running and do some tests to see how much current she pulls. I found an old 10Gig laptop hard drive, a floppy, CD-Rom, and a copy of good ole Windows 98. I figured there was no good reason to stress the little guy out with a copy of WindowsXP, especially since it only has 128M of Ram right now.




My first problem was that it drew way more current than I was hoping for. I must confess that I didn't read the freaking specs like I should have and I was expecting about a 1Amp draw from the board. Once I strip it down to the board and the Hard Drive only, its pulling about 2.1Amps. Eventually I'll replace that Laptop HD with a Compact Flash card and that should save me about .5 Amps of draw but its still a hog. I wish that I had gotten the MII6000 version that is fanless and draws much less power.
I took a look at some specs later and noted that the MII10000 draws about 15Watts when idle, and the MII6000 draws only 11Watts. Maybe the extra processing power will be worth it, we'll see.

In light of this new info, I realized that one little 12V 7Ah battery wouldn't be enough. Not only would it empty itself too fast, it would probably run hot. Luckily I already had 2 batteries of the same type so I started figuring how I would fit all this crap inside the hull of the tank.

Here is the clean tank hull, the motors and gearboxes are the only internal devices from the orginal tank.



Here is how I plan on squeezing it all in there. The motherboard is in the rear with the faceplate mounted in the back of the tank. Batteries go in the large center bay of the hull on either side, this leaves me with a gap between them for the hard drive or the SV203 or whatever else. The RDFR speed controller goes up front next to the motors it runs.

(click for larger image)

Mobile computing to the extreme

I got the whole thing mobile this morning using my old crappy laptop. The Epia board will basically replace the laptop when it comes in and hopefully be much easier to work with.

The control page is at http://www.pasqualy.com/landraider/temp/java1.html but it probably will not be on if you go look, I cant risk someone running around smashing into everything at my house etc. I really need a way to let some people watch, and let some people control, and have a que up system for those who can control.

First thing I did was mount the pan/tilt camera, I didn't use the guncam because I couldnt fit it and the laptop on the tank at the same time, the mini-ITX board should solve that problem. Notice the RDFR speed controller under the camera. (the tanks original controlling hardware was ripped out a few days ago)




Next I wired up the SV203 to the laptop and its 6V battery, the RDFR speed controller uses 12V, so eventually I'm gonna just use a 12V batt and convert it to whatever else I need.






Here is the final result, and a screen of the web interface.







More to come, hopefully I can get some help with the web interface so that it wont suck so bad.
As soon as the mini_ITX board gets here, I'll give out user/pass access and leave it running all day long.

- Cy

LandRaider motherboard purchased

I just went on a shopping spree at mini-box.com



Thier prices were excellent, and the response to my questions were super fast.

I purchased a VIA EPIA MII 10000 a 200W DC to DC converter to power it and some other goodies. I got a Compact Flash to IDE converter that will be a sweet power saver, but I don't have a CF card big enough to hold an OS yet, that will come later.
I was going to get one of the TC versions of the Epia boards that come with a built in DC-DC converter but they were under featured it seemed.

This board has a built in CF and PC card slot, and everything else you would expect to see in a full featured motherboard (USB, Vid, LAN, Sound, FireWire, etc) it only has one Ram slot and one PCI expansion slot, but I probably wont even need that. I'll use the PC card slot for the 802.11 card.

It also has TV out and LCD out options that I might use one day, but in general I wont need video unless I'm working on the board outside the LandRaider.


VIA EPIA MII10000







My wife will kill me if she finds out I just bought all this stuff.....

Control/Data flow scheme

I could do this a zillion ways, but this is how I've settled on it.



Basically, users connect over the net to my house. My router forwards the correct traffic over to the land raider via WiFi. The land raider meanwhile is sending data (mainly images) back the same way.
What I still need to decide on is if I want to do this with some browser based method (like what I have currently setup with Serial Host) or if I want to write my own application that runs on the remote computer. Maybe I can find an easy way to do both.

Getting the images/video from point to A to B is going to be the hardest thing, right now I'm just using some crap webcam software that updates every 1/2 second.

Serial Host up and running

Worked on getting serialhost up and running.

current page is
http://www.pasqualy.com/landraider/temp/java2.html

It will probably be off most of the time to avoid having people screw things up in my office etc.

I had the change the ip address, and strip most of the old crap from the buttons. The left/right turret movement is now via a hacked servo controller wired into the original turret motor. This means I can't give it absolute positions anymore, only relative movements.
I could get absolute values by attaching the servo's pot to the turrent somehow, but that would leave me with only 255 movement positions and over a 300^ arc, that kinda sucks.

Here is what the setup looks like right now, its all very temorary.




Here is a closeup of the workings. You can click the image for a larger version.

New Blog

This blog will be for landraider updates etc.
My personal Blog is at www.pasqualy.com/blog/

Any posts that show up under this one (previous date), are just reposts from the old webpage that I should be taking down/cleaning up soon.

www.pasqualy.com/landraider/

- Cy