I have a few HC-SR04s from previous Pi projects and want to use one on the camera robot and not the proposed 3 pin one shown in the blog. Is there a way I can use the mini driver also for this sensor and not use the GPIO from the Pi? I can see it has a split of some sort on the signal side but I can’t work out where the pins should go on the Aduino. Any help/guidance ( or even instructions!) would be most welcome. I’m sure someone must have had a go using this more available (and popular?) sensor?

Thanks.

Kevin.

The IR camera should work fine on the robot with no code changes needed. As far as I know, the IR camera has the same hardware, just with the IR filter removed.

Regards

Alan

I would like to know what changes in the code would have to be made to use a IR raspberry pi camera instead of the normal camera module. Do I need to add any specific libraries? How would my code for streaming change?

Thanks!

What do you mean by “connection is failed”?

According to the mini-driver documentation, the pins A4 & A5 can be connected to I2C devices. Is it possible? And do we need specific configuration for that use?
I connect an accelerometer + gyros MPU 6050 into these pins, and I attempted to upload a sample code of reading raw values from the sensor. However, the connection is failed. The code I tried is from
http://playground.arduino.cc/Main/MPU-6050#short

From the article above I guess the mini-driver is incapable of connecting to I2C devices… Could you give me some insight?

Thanks!

If sensors are connected to the mini driver, and you have the latest version of our software, then you shouldn’t need to do anything else on the robot. To see readings from the sensor the easiest way is to use the py_websockets_bot library as described in the section entitled ‘Reading from the Sensors’.

Regards

Alan

Regards,
Peter

Yes, mainly it’s a lack of space when building the sketch. If you build the mini driver firmware in the Arduino IDE with the board type set to ‘Arduino NG or older w/Atmega8′ you’ll see how much space there is or rather isn’t available. I think that in the latest version of the Arduino IDE it may say that it doesn’t fit into memory, although it does fit for version 1.01 (the version on the Pi). Looks like the Arduino libraries are bloating a bit with time.

If you wanted, you probably could fit the basics of I2C into the sketch, but then I was thinking that I’d struggle to fit the code in to actually do anything with it, and to tie it into the protocol I’ve written so that the Pi can communicate with the Mini Driver.

Interesting that you suggest getting rid of the USB cable and communicating with I2C. I’m actually trying to work out if there’s a nice way of getting rid of the cable and switching over to SPI communication. The nice thing about SPI communication is that those are the same pins used for the Atmel ISP (see here), so I could actually use it to upload sketches to the Mini Driver without needing the serial bootloader. This would free up some space for more code.

The main thing holding me back from SPI communication at the moment is the fact that I’d need some kind of level shifting on the line to protect the Pi from 5V, and also it’s not quite as foolproof to wire up as a USB cable.

Regards

Alan

as these protocols aren’t supported in the Mini Driver firmware yet, and probably won’t be due to a lack of space

What kind of space limits you’ve encountered? Not enough memory to burn the sketch with Wire library referenced ? I’m asking cause I’m about to check the I2C (would even try to connect RPi via I2C to save myself from clunky USB cables)…