Interesting tutorials with ENC28J60 and AVRs

 

On this Russian site ( Google translator ) are nice series of tutorials covering basic interfacing ENC28j60 controller and some software stuff with AVR. They talk about packets, their confirmation and lots of other interesting stuff.

Nice USB communiction explanation

I've hit very nice explanation of how USB works. There are many articles but this one is well treated.

I'm also giving out my other favourite site about USB.

Design your PCB in 3D and find how it fits into the enclosure

I was playing with SketchUp freeware 3D modeller from Google. I wanted to do a simple sketch to visualize some mounting concept with LCD and another board.

Driverlib for EvalBot !

TI did what they promised half a year ago. They published driver library specially for EvalBot. The sample which made me happy is the sound example - video inside. What the package contains?

Freescale Race Challenge 2011 Finals in Rožnov

I was in the Rožnov pod Radhoštěm to see how fast are the best autonomous slot cars in Czech and Slovak Republic. I've made some videos so you can see how the cars are speeding up on the straights and braking before corners. It's simple idea to speed up in on the straight but very hard to implement. Sometimes your learning algorithm is "lost" and has to be synchronized by start lane or on the track crossings. The car is acting much different that you were thinking and the only way to figure out what is wrong is to store some telemetry during the ride to the SD card.

My car was almost excellent on short tracks but on bigger track with lot of corners was behaving unpredictably. One change in the code affected another two parameters and the perfect tuning of the PID, learning algoritm, track synchronization, accelerometer/gyro filtering was very hard.

FYI: I was just the visitor, not the racer in the finals. Because I ended in school round somewhere near the end of the table of winners ;)

The entire playlist of my FRC 2011 videos
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=CA8F11F18AE6A378

The winners' ride:

Freescale Race Challenge 2011 - after competetion

OK, my car failed a little :) On the small testing track worked surprisingly well, but on the racing track the car behaved like lost. Few times ended out of track and I lost lot of time with manipulation of switch. Also in the second ride I accidentally pressed the SD card and the card jumped out of the car in the race :)