Jander's LEGO® Stuff

Project “Ripl3y” – Part 1

So, I’ve started work on my next project. I’ve had plans for this since around May, but haven’t had the opportunity to start on it until now – this will keep me occupied during the long Autumn/Winter evenings 🙂

I want to get a bit further with my build before I discuss what it will ultimately do, so for the moment it is codenamed “Ripl3y”. Here are a few pictures of what I have so far:

This gives me an X-Y mechanism for the core function of the project. It’s interesting using a mix of the stud-less and studded beams. It’s been quite a number of years (decades) since I’ve used studded beams, so I’d forgotten that they are essentially 1/2 a beam out of alignment with the stud-less versions. Thankfully that’s not caused me any issues. The build will ultimately have another four long linear functions that use the rack pieces, so this has been a good learning exercise.

Here’s a video of it initialising itself and going through a simple test routine to check that I’d got my degrees of rotation calculations correct:

I’ve got a lot more building, and I mean a lot more, so I’ll be posting more about it soon I hope.

EV3 Mailbox Messaging

So, I’ve carried on with my work on writing an AI2 app to send Mailbox messages via bluetooth to an EV3. I now have a platform I can work with for my particular needs.

Before I discuss my results, I figure it’s worth covering the path that’s lead me to this point. Back in July I was showing off my Plott3r at the Manchester Bricktastic event. One thing the children often asked was could it write their name. The answer to this was ‘no’ since there was no way of getting user-defined text in to the Plott3r (irrespective of no ‘font’ being defined). So since then I have been looking at how to do this. My options have been:

LEGO keyboard – very complex, but I’m still considering mechanisms.
“Pantograph” style pen mechanism – too much backlash in my prototypes to be accurate.
Ultrasonic triangulating system – this would work out where a stylus was over a keyboard layout. This proved too jittery and inaccurate.
Using an old mobile phone to send a text message to the EV3.

The last one of sending a text message seemed to be the simplest. Many kinds are used to using a touchscreen keyboard, so would be easiest to use. So the next challenge was to work out how write an App to send text to the EV3. After some searching and chatting I came across MIT’s App Inventor 2 which looked perfect for the job, especially as it has EV3 support for some things. So that’s what I’ve been working on.

Unfortunately for me AI2 doesn’t (yet) have support for Mailbox messages with the EV3. Since it has a SendBytes method for the bluetooth client I could look at how to send a ‘raw’ Mailbox message. Thankfully there are quite a few good resources out there; two of which I found useful are:

They had enough information in there for me to construct a simple message that I blogged about previously (My First BT Message). Since then I have expanded on that to produce a procedure that can take variable input text messages.

I’ve had to go down the path of implementing IEEE 754 so that I can send floating point numbers to the EV3. These are the reasons why:

I want to send a string of text to the EV3 to be plotted.
That text has to be sent as a Mailbox message.
EV3g, the default language, has poor text manipulation capabilities so I’d have to send one Mailbox message per-letter.
I implemented the text Mailbox method that can take any length message even though I’d only send one letter at a time – getting the Android device to do the text string manipulation.
My original concept of taking each letter and looking up, using a huge switch statement, the stroke paths needed for that letter won’t work. It’s not (apparently) possible to have a switch statement case that can match a double quote “, or a newline \n. Oh dear.
Since the app is already converting the text into ASCII values I could just send them over instead. That way I can match numerically on ASCII 10 and 34. This has the added advantage that I can then use array lookups instead – look up in one array for the offsets in to the stroke data.
I can’t just send raw byte values. The EV3 uses IEEE 754 floating point for numbers, so I have to send that in a Mailbox message.
Oh dear – AI2 doesn’t have a native IEEE 754 implementation. Oh well, let’s write my own!

So here I am. I’ve now written an IEEE 754 implementation. It’s incomplete as it doesn’t handle underflow at all, but does do the number range that I need, zero, and NaN. I only need to send 0-255 over, but it does do most of the numbers that the EV3 will realistically need to deal with.

The value entered was 314159.26 but was sent/received as 314159.25. This is correct for a 32 bit float, and is confirmed via Perl scripts and an online converter.

The AI2 code is available from:

http://jander.me.uk/LEGO/resources/Testing_Ideas.aia

and as usual is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

I still have a lot of work to do:

I need to split the text into individual letters to send the ASCII value.
I need to program the Plott3r to accept a stream of values and special codes to plot.
I need to work out some form of ‘font’ to be plotted.
The final app needs to be written to make it easy to use.
A LEGO® ‘holster’ needs to be made to hold the phone 🙂

They’ll take a while, but I’m a good way there, I already have ideas for how to do points 1-3, especially 2-3, so we’ll see how they pan out. Updates to come.

Update on my Bluetooth EV3 Mailbox testing.

I managed to focus some more time on tidying up my AI2 app for sending Mailbox messages via Bluetooth from my Android phone to an EV3. The EV3 code is really simple and looks like this:

The AI2 code provides two BT related buttons, Connect & Disconnect, a text box and a Go button to send the text:

Screenshot_20160825-211129

When the text is entered and Go pressed it is sent as a Mailbox message with the name “beep” to the EV3, and displayed on its screen. The code to send it has to construct a message in the form:

MLenL, MLenH, 0x01, 0x00, 0x81, 0x9E, NLen, NameBytes, 0x00, TLenL, TLenH, TextBytes, 0x00

Which breakdown as:

MLenL, MLenH = 16 bit little endian length of the rest of the message
0x0001 = Message counter
0x81 = System command, no reply
0x9E = Mailbox message
NLen = 8 bit name length, including 0x00 termination
NameBytes + 0x00 = The Mailbox name
TLenL, TLenH = 16 bit little endian length of the text
TextBytes + 0x00 = The Mailbox text

This in terms of code looks like:

If you would like to play with the code it’s available from my resources site at:

The code is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

My First BT Message !

The code above may not look much, but I’m very pleased with it 🙂 I’ve been working with MIT’s App Inventor 2 in an effort to build an app that can send text (in some form) to the EV3 for further processing – that code has managed it!

I’d extended the EV3 tilt-to-drive tutorial from the AI2 site to add in an extra button, that when pressed runs that code. It’s fixed at the moment but it encapsulates (little endian) 0x0018, 0x0001, 0x81, 0x9e, 0x5, beep\0, 0x0006, Beep!\0. All this info has been derived from the LEGO® Communications Developer Kit docs.

To test this I had a simple program, as below, running on the brick:

Press the button on the app, and the EV3 beeps – superb!

It also shows an interesting behaviour which I may well exploit in an upcoming model – I had one program running on the EV3, solely to beep, but was still able to drive the bot from my phone. Being able to externally control an EV3 whilst it is running its own program has a lot of merit.

Developing an Android App for EV3

At the Bricktastic event back in July I showed off my Plott3r as part of the Mindstorms exhibits. It was programmed to do the Hilbert and Dragon curves, several plot “files” and some other bits.

One of the questions that the kids kept asking was something along the lines of “can it write my name?” Unfortunately it wasn’t, and isn’t, capable of writing ad-hoc text. So since then I’ve been pondering ways of supplying user-provided text. I did consider an ultrasonic triangulated “keyboard”, but the US sensors got confused with each other’s signals – so for the moment I’ve put that idea to bed to be revisited in the future. My original thought, however, was “can I do this with a mobile phone?”

Since that original thought I’ve been looking at how to write an Android app that has a simple text box and “send” button. Kids are used to mobiles these days, so it seems to me to be the perfect UI. So far I seem to have settled on using MIT’s App Inventor 2. It does support EV3 to some extent, but I’m going to have to get down and dirty with the EV3 byte code to send mailbox messages via bluetooth 🙂

So, now I need to get learning how this AI2 system works. Thankfully they have tutorials, so I’ll be building the tilt/move tutorial soon to get to grips with communicating with the EV3. Tinkering with bytecode won’t be too daunting as I’m used to getting down to that level of bit twiddling via my current and previous jobs.

Nothing to show yet, but watch this space!

DuckToppl3r BIs are now complete!

DuckToppl3r

I have now completed the BIs and commented the code to the RobotRemix3 DuckToppl3r! The announcement of the MCP RR3 challenge can be found at: http://www.thenxtstep.com/2016/07/robot-remix-3.html

My guest blogger post can also be found at: http://www.thenxtstep.com/2016/07/duck-toppl3r-robotremix3.html

The BIs and code are available from:

BIs PDF: http://jander.me.uk/LEGO/resources/DuckToppl3r.pdf
Low(er) res BIs: http://jander.me.uk/LEGO/resources/DuckToppl3r-lr.pdf
Code: http://jander.me.uk/LEGO/resources/DuckToppl3r.ev3

Enjoy – I did doing this 🙂

Text per-page for LPub4

LPub4 offers a way to add text to a page, but no option for text to appear on every page. Whilst working on the BIs for the DuckToppl3r I had a need to put a disclaimer on each page. I am lead to believe that LPub3D can do this, but that is currently a Windows-only program. Since LDraw and LPub4 use text and I’m no stranger to Perl I figured a quick script would come to my rescue 🙂

LPub4 produces a new page on each STEP or ROTSTEP statement when not in a multi-step page, or on a “MULTI_STEP END” statement. So, all I needed to was to output the same “INSERT TEXT” statement above one of those three where relevant. The code used is as below if this proves to be useful to anyone:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Getopt::Long;

$first = 'The MINDSTORMS® Community Partners present ROBOTREMIX3 [31313 + 42050] Community Challenge 2016. DUCK TOPPL3R Design & Building Instructions by Jerry Nicholls.';
$second = 'MINDSTORMS is a registered trademark of The LEGO Group. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. August 2016';

GetOptions( 'first=s' => \$first, 'second=s' => \$second );

$multi = 0;
while(<>) {
 $multi = 1 if /MULTI_STEP\s+BEGIN/;

 if ((!$multi && /^0\s+(?:ROT)?STEP\s/) ||
     (/MULTI_STEP\s+END/)) {
     $multi = 0;
     print <<"TEXT";
0 !LPUB INSERT TEXT "$first" "Helvetica,18,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0" "Black" OFFSET 0.06 0.935
0 !LPUB INSERT TEXT "$second" "Helvetica,18,-1,5,75,0,0,0,0,0" "Black" OFFSET 0.06 0.95
TEXT
  }
 print;
}

Attempting to start blogging about my LEGO® models.

DuckToppl3r

I’m going to try to start to blog about the models I’ve built, those I’m pondering on, and those that are in progress.

Some weeks back I started on the RobotRemix3 DuckToppl3r project (http://www.thenxtstep.com/2016/07/robot-remix-3.html) and am very close to releasing the BIs (Build Instructions) and the .EV3 code file to the public. When that happens, I’ll blog on here again. In the meantime here’s a link to TNS’s article on it: http://www.thenxtstep.com/2016/07/duck-toppl3r-robotremix3.html

For simplicity I’ll probably keep my BIs and code on my original site to save lots of copying around.