Author name: Scott

I make robots and exoskeletons work on classic cars, write software and books.

The Early Days of Scott’s Bots

I thought I’d put a post together summarizing some of my robots as I prepare to archive and rebuild ScottsBots.Com.

TetherBot – 1999

I built this robot in 1999. I hacked two hobby servers (Futaba 3003) to make it move and built my own sensors with some parts from Radio Shack. To move this robot I connected an ethernet cable to the parallel port on my Windows 98 Machine.

Baby Joe – 2001

This was my second and third robot. I reused the hacked servo motors from TetherBot, but this time I used a Basic Stamp microcontroller to control the IR sensors and send PWM signals to the servo motors. I also used Aluminum and plexiglass as construction materials.

Rovey – 2002

I started to experiment with different chassis materials (this time PVC). Also because I had more servos (pan/tilt) webcam and 2 drive servos (same ones) I upgraded the controller from a Basic Stamp 2 to a Scott Edwards Mini-SSC. This device allowed me to send commands to the servos with 3 bytes (255, servo(0-7), position (0-255). So (255,0,127) would send a stop/neutral pulse to servo connected to the 0 pin. (255,0,0) would send full clockwise pulse to the servo on pin 0. (255,0,255) would send a full counter clockwise pulse to the servo on pin 0. This is a great little board and one I use to this day on some of my new robots.

I created this robot for a talk at COSI. The idea was that students could login and control the robot from a web browser. The idea of the talk was to connect with Mars Pathfinder robot which at the time was discovering it’s way around Mars. The photo isn’t great I tried to create a Martian landscape and added rocks for the robot to explore. The robot was tethered so it could have continuous power, but to prevent the robot from getting tangled I connected the robot wires to a string hung from the ceiling.

The Early Days of Scott’s Bots Read More »

No CodeMash 2022

In early December during the build of the Mark3 suit I had a catastrophic failure of my CNC Z-Axis limit switch. (See Below).

Because of this the machine was unable to home, and without being able to home, I couldn’t cut anything. I was unable to get it fixed with new parts until the week of Christmas and didn’t want to spend my entire holiday catching up trying to get it built.

I will post about the Mark 3 on my YouTube Channel “Almost Iron Man“.

Stay Tuned!

No CodeMash 2022 Read More »

Ethereum Mining Trial

So this week-end I did an experiment with Ethereum Mining. The first thing I did was use a calculator. Here’s one from CryptoCompare.com.

CryotoCompare.com

Now according to this calculator, I should make around $36 bucks a month for my Nvidia GTX 1060 Card. Well, I did an experiment and after 28 hours I made $1.10. This comes out to about $0.04/hour or $0.94/day, but I’m actually paying $0.49 in electricity cost. So the net is $0.45/day or $13.71 per month. This makes the calculator wrong by about 263%. This link above has net profit at $1.20/day. So the hash rate was a lot lower than stated both on miner and on other estimates for this card.

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The Big Network Refactor – Part 2

The next step in setting up my network was adding additional “LANS” to my network. So while before I was happy with two networks 192168.1.1/24 and 10.10.10.1/24. I really wanted more isolation from my IoT network, Security Camera Network, my Raspberry PI and Smart-Home network and the computers and devices we use all the time.

Here’s a list of my networks:

  • Home Private Network
  • Semi-Private Network & Private WiFi
  • Raspberry Pi Network & WiFi
  • Security Camera Network & WiFi
  • IoT & Media Network & WiFi
  • Guest Network

To do this I needed a router and firewall (EdgeRouter-X) and I needed a few managed switches because I didn’t want to run new cable.

Starting with the router I set-up the following:

EdgeRouter-X Swtich0 Configuration

The interesting thing I needed to learn here is the PVID is a “tagged” VLAN. I made this correspond to the network 192.168.4.1/24. This means anything that connects to this port “unmanaged” will get an IP from the 192.168.4.1/24 DHCP server. But if there’s a managed switch connected to this network, it will be able to route traffic for the VLANs 10,20,30, and 40.

The second thing I needed to do was configure my managed switch. DLink DGS-1100-08V2.

Managed Switch VLAN Configuration

The tagged VLAN port here is eth1. This is tagged with VID = 4. This is the same PVID leaving the router. I have 2 untagged ports eth6 and eth7 for this VLAN. This means they will get IP addresses from the 192.168.4.1/24 DHCP server just like it was connected to eth4 from my EdgeRouter-X.

I connected my Access Point and my other managed switch to eth6 and eth7.

I have eth2 mapped to 10, so now anything connected there will get 192.168.10.1/24 addresses. I have eth3 mapped to 20, so now anything connected there will get 192.168.20.1/24 addresses. I have eth4 mapped to 30, so now anything connected there will get 192.168.30.1/24 addresses. I have eth5 mapped to 40, so now anything connected there will get 192.168.40.1/24 addresses.

Notice the PVID up on the top row as well. 4, 10, 20, 30, 40, 4, 4, 1.

The last setting was configuring my access point. This is an EnGenius EAP1300.

EnGenius EAP1300 Wireless Settings

The Big Network Refactor – Part 2 Read More »

Installing OctoPrint w/Docker on Pi3

I always found it a pain to deal with Python libraries and virtual environments on my Raspberry Pis. I decided to give Docker a try as it would completely isolate my OctoPrint environment from the other stuff I had running on the PI.

Step 1 – Installing Docker

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh

sudo sh ./get-docker.sh 

sudo usermod -aG docker pi

#remember to logout and back in

docker info

docker run hello-world

You should get an output like this:

Step 2 – Install and Run OctoPrint

# find your serial port
ls -latr /dev/tty

# create a volume
docker volume create octoprint

# run your container
docker run -d --restart unless-stopped -v octoprint:/octoprint \
-p 5000:80 --device /dev/ttyUSB1:/dev/ttyUSB1 --name octoprint \ octoprint/octoprint

Replace 5000 with the port you want it on and ttyUSB1 with your serial port identifier.

Now you can browser to your PI’s IP address http://ipaddress:5000

That’s it. Happy Printing!

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