Neste Stopp: Trondheim

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View from Gamle Bybro, Trondheim

We are moving to Trondheim!

Two weeks ago, we visited Trondheim in order to get to know the city and my potential future employer. Trondheim is a very sweet, medium-sized, city located at a Fjord with a river going through it and with plenty of beautiful nature around it. With the NTNU (Norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universitet), SINTEF (Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning), and many technology companies in the city, this is also the technology capital of Norway. Everything went really well and in the meantime I singed the contract as research scientists in marine computer aided engineering/software engineering. Now we are planning and organising everything necessary for this exciting move and I am very happy to be able to do this as a family.

We are very much looking forward to this adventure!

Storage Houses along the River Sweet Cafés in Nedre Bakklandet Wooden Ships in the Harbour
View from Lade City Bikes in Trondheim Flight over Norway

RPi2C

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I recently ordered a bunch of I2C breakout boards to tinker around with. The first thing I implemented, using the Pi4J library, was a simple eight by eight version of Conway’s Game of Life using an I2C controlled bicolor LED matrix from Adafruit.
I2C 8x8 Game of Life

Next I build a simple two-wheeled robotic platform (RPi2C) to test the 9DOF MPU9150 breakout board from Sparfun. This little chip integrates accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer into a single package and also includes what Invensense calls a digital motion processor for on-board sensor fusion.
RPi2C RPi2C

The two wheels are driven by basic Parallax continuous rotation servos and controlled by the same I2C based PCA9685 breakout board from Adafruit I already used on the RaspberryPylot. As the MPU9150 DMP requires uploading of firmware via I2C which I still need to implement, I’m currently simply using the raw gyro data and a PID controller for very basic stabilisation. Also the low rotational speed of the servo motors limits the ability to recover from disturbances. Fusing the sensor data of the accelerometer and the gyro, an improved controller, and maybe stronger motors should deliver better results, soon.

The platform also includes a basic bread-board, a bunch of potentiometers, switches, and buttons, as well as an ADS1115 16-Bit ADC and a SX1509 16 Output I/O Expander for happy tinkering. ;-)