13. Lighting up the Robot

A major part of the modern electronic devices glamour comes from the calm inhuman glow of the LED's carefully embedded into their bodies.

Our robot is not an exception. Adding just couple simple LEDs, changed its appearance radically. Let's see what resources the robotics designers can tap into, and bring more light into their projects.

12. Better Remote Control with FPV

Making Things Complicated

In one of the previous posts, we explained the initial version of the remote control system, implemented for our robot. It was based on a simple protocol and used RoboRemo application as a remote control user interface.

The simplicity of the solution posed some limits on the functions. At some point, we decided to make a step forward and implement a more complicated remote control version.

Mainly - we were looking for:

• FPV (First Person View) - the possibility to see the real-time video from the camera installed at the robot
• Usage of joystick or steering wheel to control the robot
• Having a big dashboard with many small controls which can operate numerous features of the robot and indicate on the screen the real status which is based on telemetry
• Possibility to see all the traffic between the robot and the remote control application, having the possibility to type commands manually

We could not find anything ready to use, so we decided to build own application from scratch.