Wheel-E Control Panel
In December of 2020, CIRC started building a control panel for Wheel-E, the club Robomagellan robot. Born out of a brainstorming session from Summer 2020, the original rough concept was for a touchscreen/display with a few simple functions, such as a safe shutdown feature for powering off Wheel-E’s raspberry pi. We envisioned the display bolted into Wheel-E’s chassis and communicating with the pi over a serial link such as CAN or SPI.
It might be an understatement to say that the original project concept has evolved since those early days. During Winter ‘21, Matt put together an initial working concept using an old Arduino board he had laying around (Chipkit Max32), plus a new 3.2“ TFT LCD screen with resistive touchscreen from Adafruit. After showing off this initial prototype to club members, the brainstorming really took off. From the original idea of an on-board touchscreen with a few simple functions, we landed on a handheld touchscreen device communicating wirelessly with Wheele over a LoRa datalink. Now we wanted to be able to drive Wheel-E around by virtual joystick via the wireless touchscreen while mapping out GPS routes, then flip over to autonomous mode and let Wheel-E roam.
In May of ’21, we had a nice proof of concept demonstration at a club build session. With the display connected to a laptop via USB, we were able to forward command velocity data from the touchscreen into Wheel-E’s ROS control infrastructure, and drive the ‘bot around Mike’s driveway.
During Summer and Fall of ‘21, the project solidified into a more stable programmable display platform. The old Chipkit Max32 Arduino was replaced with a more modern Adafruit Feather M0 (48MHz ARM CortexM0 CPU), which includes a 900MHz LoRa radio module on-board. Matt was able to spend some time getting a better software architecture in place, to be able to keep up with the flow of brainstorming ideas that inevitably come out of CIRC build sessions. And Tom put his 3D printer through its paces, coming up with several concepts for an ergonomic handheld device that would contain the display and associated electronics/battery.
Current status as of May ‘22, the touchscreen has a functional menu system that is relatively easy to add/extend with new ideas as they come up at build sessions. A GPS unit is installed and displays current position. Support needs to be added to save waypoints for Wheel-E to follow. The biggest outstanding feature at the moment is to demonstrate the LoRa wireless link. Based on some early prototyping, the LoRa functionality on the display is more or less functional. To complete the concept for a working demo, a LoRa module needs to be added on-board Wheel-E with some basic message encoding/decoding and forwarding over Wheel-E’s CAN datalink.
Follow along! We archive source code and track issues for the touchscreen here: https://github.com/CentralIllinoisRoboticsClub/wheele_gui
September 13, 2022 at 9:35 pm | Projects | No comment
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