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hello my name is david well and i'm going to give a talk today about building a wireless robot controller using the bbc microbit and you can find me on twitter as wellygeek you can email me david thinkingbinaries.com and i work for a company called thinking binaries and what thinking binaries does is they write firmware for um embedded products so it's the software that goes inside products you wouldn't know how to computer inside them and i wish i could tell you about all the exciting things that i do but unfortunately i've had to sign non-disclosure agreements with everybody so it's all secret stuff but it's all pretty really cool but if you imagine the sorts of software you can write for a raspberry pi or for a micro bit then if you write more of that and you write more technical low level stuff and then it loads into a product and then you sell that product to someone that's the sort of stuff that i do thinking binaries is a sponsor of pie wars this year and you'll also find me in the expert area where i'm giving a very very tiny version of this talk start by saying a little bit about who i am and what i do i've done some pretty large projects with the ozzy pie over the years some of you may remember these in 2013 i built the world's biggest riser by display which was a i think 12 meters by 7 meters display that was at goodwood racetrack for the green power race finals and you may know my partnering crime martial handling we wrote a book together called adventures minecraft which is all about writing python codes to change the way minecraft works and i've spent quite a few years being the official microwork wizard so working with the market education foundation and doing some weird and wacky projects and some of these weird and wacky projects in 2016 i was on tv with one show with a school called valley boom academy and we used three micro bits together under artifi and we controlled the level telescope at george bank and we found a pulsar which is quite exciting stuff 2017 you may have seen me presenting at pycon and i was presenting the initial idea of bitio which was an idea that came out originally from my book as to how to do physical computing with the micro bit and the razer player together to control minecraft and i turned it into a standard package in 2017 also i did some work with the um the bet show at the excel center and we turned a rocky pie playing pieces of music or musical notes and 40 micro bits into a tone matrix so each micro bit represented one note on and off and then the raspberry pi was linked to those 40 micro bits and you could turn the notes on and off it would play a musical piece and again in 2017 2017 was a really busy year for me as you can tell and i did some work with bbc click live they did a live stage show in old broadcasting house in london and we had 200 micro bits all communication over the radio communicating to my mac on the on the stage and we conducted the orchestra and the best way to show this actually i think is through some pictures so here's the pictures of those so you can see uh the book that i bought you can buy it off of amazon if anyone wants to learn how to code with minecraft and we have some microbit projects in there and also all of the projects in their work under rcpi this is the bbc click project we had an audience of i think it was a 400 but you only had enough micro bits to do the the downstairs part that was quite good fun this is the tone matrix so it's actually 41 micro bits there's 40 micro bits in a like a circle and in a matrix and you press the buttons on the front and it turns the display on and off and then the razzie pie goes around and works out which micro bits are on which are off and it will play a musical note in a sequence this is the jodrell bank gig so this is one of the world's largest radio telescopes and we linked this up it was three micro bits talking to a raspberry pi and there was a pie took another network to their control system and actually as you tilted the micro bit it would send commands to the level telescope and it would turn to to lock into uh styles and pulsars this is the big display that you may may remember that's on the raspberry blog and this is me giving a presentation at pycon now there's something that links all of these they all have rosy pies and micro bits involved somehow and they all have a um a way of linking the micro bit to the rising pie so the mic bit is another device and one of the great things about the microbit is it has built-in sensors and you'll see that we'll be using that in this project but i've written a package called bitio which i first presented at pycon in 2017 and that gives you an easy way to just plug a microphone into a razor pie write some python on the right supply that accesses the sensors and the display and other features of the mic bed okay so first thing i think i should talk about is the first attempt that we had in the club to do a robot controller this was the students academy of arsenal player club this was the first year that we'd attended the competition and we had about a year leading to doing the project and we wanted a nice way of controlling the robot we didn't want wires connecting it wanted the wireless way of doing it and our limited research led us to suggest we could just buy a controller off of the internet and plug it in and work and you know pretty much that is the case but one of the challenging things about our supply club which is the case for many stem clubs is that we're in a classroom somewhere that has no internet access we're not allowed to have engine access and unless we really really organize and prepare everything in advance at home then we turn up for 45 minute club and we unbox this shiny new controller and it's all you know git clone this pseudo apt install that suit apt get upgrade the os you know even if we typed it to our phone it could take us several hours to download the the updated os so what we really needed was something that would just run on our razzie pie and we had quite an old raspberry pi it was only a rise of prior b model one so one of the original devices and so we didn't spend a lot of time fiddling around upgrading it we wanted to spend time building the robot really so we thought well um how hard can it be let's make our own controller what have we got in the cupboard and we had a box of microbits that the bbc had sent us for the original rollout so we thought well let's make something useful out of those so the idea was to use two micro bits one of them would be used as the controller and that would be battery controlled actually powered and it would send messages to a receiver the receiver would pass those messages on over usb to the robot controller which is a varsity pie there's a package already out there called pi serial that we we had installed on our pi fortunately and that would basically turn the motors on and off and different combinations and speeds to give us some traction and the idea then was that you tilt the micro bit and what would happen is as you took the mic a bit the robot would move in different directions so we prototyped this and like any good engineers we started small and added more features so one of the kids in the club wrote a little piece of code for the receiver only so you tilted the receiver and it was plugged in via the usb we needed to check that link out first and it would send a message a single character s for stop f forward b for back alpha left alpha right and then someone else in the club wrote the motor controller code which turned the motors on in different sequences and we managed to get the robot to move that was great and we'd managed to do that in one lesson one session of the club which is quite good it's always worth thinking with clubs what can you do in 30 45 minutes also allowing for you know set up and pack away time so that you've actually achieved something in the club next step was to then get it wireless so the problem of course is that we're now going to walk around with the robot because we've got this usb lead and while you can by 10 meter usb leads they're a bit of a pain if they come out halfway through you know you're going through some some maze or something so then i left the kids at it and they scratched heads for a bit and worked out how to write the controller so that it would send messages and those messages from the receiver would then go with the existing code dead veteran to the robot controller and that was another couple of lessons i think trying to get it to work but that worked pretty well and then we had a wireless controller for our robot what we ended up with interesting was a rather strange artifact in the receiver so if you look at the code here because the receiver was originally everything it was the tilt sensing and it was the sending the message when they'd refactored the code and split it apart what they did was basically the controller would send an s to the receiver and then the receiver because it's got most of the original code in it would say if i see an s i'll send an s to the raspberry pi and that means stop and so on for the others so we end up with this knowledge of how the control works in both of the micro bits and you see a bit later on that caused us a problem but that was more that was the side effect of refactoring the code rather than sort of throwing away and starting again really i think um we did find on the day that it was a little bit jumpy to use so the you know the the tilting utility and the thing would lurch forward then you'd move it back because it was going too quick and then it would lurch backwards so it was a bit hard to control but it took a bit of practice to get used to it we spent a lot of time up in the um up in the rooms upstairs practicing before we went downstairs on the challenge mats it wasn't easy to change so we could have changed things about sensitivity and about perhaps some of the commands it would have been nice to have different speeds on it because all of the logic about the commands was baked into both micro bits it meant to make a single change you'd have to change most micro bits and that also mean because of the way we built a robot that the the receiver microcommit which is plugged in with a really really tiny usb lead um and was all had a case on it and everything would have been quite hard to disassemble and especially as there wasn't a lot of time between each of the challenges so we just put up with you know being a bit jumpy basically but it would be nice to be able to customize it and you'll see that when we look into the second attempt which is what i'm presenting today that it's now a lot easier to to modify the code because we don't have this baked in knowledge inside the receiver about how the thing works okay so here's the new design and the new design is based on vitio so you'll see that um there's standard hex file that we load on the receiver here there's a standard package that we load on the raspberry pi there's a little glue code and you see that code later it's tiny but you always end up with a little bit of glue code when you write standard software and then our standard code for driving the motors and then over here on the controller i've basically written the controls from scratch again because i wanted more control over the sensitivity and things so it's got sensing he's got some filtering on there so there's a thing called dead zone so as you hold the mic a bit and as you tilt it you have to tilt it forward quite a bit and back quite a bit before it starts to respond and that's just so there's a dead zone in the middle so the way the robot will stop and that's quite important for the controllability um it's got a display on it so it displays little uh tilted arrows so that you can as the controller you can you can see what it's doing and obviously it does the radio transmit and um it's also got some button sets in i haven't used it yet but the idea is you can press the buttons and open a grabber or fire a nerf gun or something like that but pretty much from this line here to this line here is all standard so it receives a radio message and the radio message pops out this other side and then the glue code just decides based on that radio message what way to turn the motors and so all of that is standard you don't have to change the receiver whenever you change any of the controller code and you could have multiple prepared controllers with different settings in them and just turn one off and turn another one on i wouldn't recommend you have more than one controller running at the same time that could be like a bit of a tug of war between people um but you you can um have multiple prepared microbes so you could have someone upstairs in in the you know in the work room um perhaps tuning the sensitivity to the controller while someone is actually using the robot so that's quite an interesting design now okay so now to the demo see if things always go wrong isn't it um okay so i've got a demo program here which glues everything together and i've got a microbit here that's already loaded and transmitting and i've got a mic of it here that will have video connected to it and i've got an usb cable now one of the biggest problems sometimes is working out which serial port your mic bit is connected to so this just uses a standard feature of vitio which is what it does it scans the mic bits so you just follow the instructions make sure there's no devices there press enter because the scan of the system found 132 devices because the mac's got loads of virtual devices already plug the usb cable in a few seconds press enter again does it after that scan it's 133 devices so one of them is new so it differences the lists and says well the one that i found is tty usb mode and one four one two i never could have guessed that you know if i'd tried um so press y that now remembers that and now the program runs and you only have to do that once you never have to do it again if you don't unless you change the usb port and then it will scan again so that's quite nice and it's the same on the raspberry pi and it stores the serial port inside a text file so if you do actually know this on the right so i supply it it's tty cm0 you can just type that in the text file and it's all set up ready so you never need to actually do that on the day so now i have my micro bit and let's try and do this so you can see what i'm doing so i can see what i'm doing as well so as i took the market forward the robot goes forward as i took the market backwards verbal goes backwards if i put some extra tilt into it i tilt it forward into the right a bit i can do some lovely little little tiny turns little swirls do the same the other way i've got quite fine control over it really really fine control there's um an added mode in this simulator because simulators maybe play again i'll put like a little force field around it so if you hit the main wall it just bounces back just like a real robot would actually bounce off the wall and go backwards and i can go forwards and i can tilt and then obviously when i close the program down so i'll just control c in this window here then that window disappears and that's it basically so you'll see on the mic itself it's got these little narrows it's quite hard to see on the screen but the arrow is dependent on which way you're tilting it so that as you're getting used to especially in a like a competition environment where you've got maybe six people in the team and they're all having to go it takes a little while to get used to the controller and what's quite useful is it actually has a an image on the display it was a dot in the middle when it stopped and that's when it's in the dead zone and that really is just to calibrate the user really so the user knows what they're doing while they're getting used to the controller but all the settings in here are configurable by just changing numbers in the code so you can change the sensitivity yourself okay just to finish off let's have a little look at a couple of the design aspects so here's the internal architecture it's basically it's bitio does all the hard work that's got pie cereal built inside it there's a file called r controlled up high which is all the actual controller code the glue code and then demo is basically is is where you put your code and this is it this is the code that you you modify so you you sense the controller and you get a gear a speed and a direction and you just basically call functions that control your robot and then i've got a robot to pi which is a simulated robot basically so you throw that away and you put your real robot in there so you can attach it to any motor controller is the idea um the sensing basically has a dead zone so if you imagine the x and the y tilt then i think it's a 100 or 200 so anything in this region won't won't move the robot and then this is me just working out the various corners so i can send the right message and then the display so this is again i like sketch things out on paper so this is me designing the little icons for the display and working out what numbers they send there's nine different positions and the the last bit is worth looking at is the radio format so i came up with a standard message so it starts off with rc to mean remote control so if you were uh if there are other microgrids sending radio messages and didn't want to interfere what the receiver does is it ignores anything unless it starts with rc and you can change that unique code there's a sequence number that changes by one every time a message is received that could be used to detect lost messages for example so your robot could beep if it's at a range then it sends the a and the b button so you can press a button and it will sense the buttons to open a grabber or something like that sends the gear forward stop or backward sends the the rate or the speed there's a number in the range from naught to 99 and then it sends it's assigned a number that's a plus and minus it sends the steering the directions so from minus 99 to plus 99 so you've got quite a lot of control over the steering if you want that i originally was going to put checksum in but i didn't bother i thought i don't actually need that and that works quite nicely and all the codes written for that it's all in github joining to remote is really simple i basically said change this in four places in the code in the demo and robbie is my simulated visual robot but you basically just control your motors in there and to set up basically you go to github you press the code button download a zip unzip it and then you run the download at pi and it all just happens as i do okay so that's pretty much it you can get the code from github.com while a geek robot controller if you have problems or anything you can probably the easiest way is to log a github ticket and i'll always answer questions on there when i can and it'd be really nice if someone picked this up and did something with it try to control their robot with it buttons a and b would be quite fun to get working if you want to have a go at that you can also transmit radio messages back to the controller so you could get the raspberry pi or razer pi robot to send a message back to say what its battery life is for example and you could display that on the controller screen which would be really fun way of doing it you could have more than one controller but that will get a bit interesting i think and if you decide that micro bit radio control is not the way forward you might want to go and see martin o'hanon's talk and he's doing a talk about blue dot which is a way of doing the same sort of thing from a smartphone and that's pretty cool as well um i'm asking that i quite enjoyed doing the mic a bit because it's something we could build from scratch in the club and we had all the skills to do it find the bluetooth a little bit tricky sometimes to get working but martin's done all the hard work of getting the bluetooth working okay so if anyone's got any questions please ask them now um you can always contact me via twitter you've got my email twitter's probably better actually or if you've got a specific question about the code and you want to try it out and you're having problems or whatever or you've got ideas to change it github issues is the best way to get in contact thanks so much and hope this talk was interesting bye