Category Archives: News

DPRG Monthly Meeting – RoboColumbus-Plus Canada RESCHEDULED– October 26, 2024

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Join DPRG on October 26, 2024, 10:00AM CDT, at the Dallas Maker Space for a group meeting. The Canadian RoboColumbus Plus Competition to be held in the Stoney Creek, Onterio area has been rescheduled to coincide with the local competition in Farmersville on November 23rd.

At this month’s meeting, Dallas area competitors in next month’s local RoboColumbus-Plus competition, are encouraged to show-and-tell the current progress of their robots.

Pizza will be served at Noon. The meeting is open to all.

note: The featured image of this article is part of an inside DPRG running joke with our Canadian members.

DPRG Monthly Meeting – How to Debug with JTAG, and ROS2 on a Rpi Zero 2W – September 28, 2024

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Join DPRG on September 28, 2024, 10:00AM CDT, at the Dallas Maker Space for two presentations made by DPRG’s own Scott Gibson and Mike Williamson.
 

 
GitHub Link:  ROS2 on Rpi Zero 2W
Mike presents his “ROS2 on Raspberry Pi Zero 2W” project – the cheapest way to experiment with ROS2. ROS2 is a set of open-source robotic middleware and tools.
 
 

 
Scott’s Slidedeck:  Develop and Debug with JTag and VisualGDB
 
Scott shows us “How to Debug with JTAG” for microcontrollers and even the Raspberry Pi. JTAG is an industry standard for testing, debugging, and programming electronic devices. This presentation will introduce you to true debugging, versus beginner methods such as adding print statements.
 
 

These presentations are a great opportunity to be introduced to both of these powerful techniques, which will improve your robot building skills. Pizza will be served at the meeting.

More Details about Presentations:

Debugging using JTAG – Scott Gibson
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“I will be using visual studio (code , community, or the full version will work)  I will be using it with visualGDB plugin. VisualGDB has a trial period but is a package that is purchased. I will be reviewing two different arm families. The LPC series from NXP and the stm32 platform from ST. I will mostly cover C code from my robots. And show some coding bugs I have run into.” Scott previewed his talk at the Robot Builder’s Night Virtual; video clip of his preview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQRFLpQ_vis&t=60s

Scott provided this document that shows what you should install in order to debug with a JTAG interface:
 
 
ROS2 on Rasberry Pi Zero 2W – Mike Williamson
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This project installs the Robot Operating System, ROS2, on about the cheapest ($15) platform that can run it, and connects an LED and an SR04 Ultrasonic range sensor and makes them work. If you’ve got $20 to spend on self-improvement, this is good value. If you have an old Raspberry Pi 3 lying around, or a 4, they will work too (and run faster).

Per suggestion at a monthly meeting, we will likely have a few sessions on ROS2 that will each be shorter in length than usual, possibly presented by different speakers, which will build up from the basics. This is the first one (and the first time we’ve tried this). The intent is to eventually aggregate them into a composite video that covers the topic.

Mike provided a github repo with a README that shows you what parts you need, and what to download:

A direct link to the wiring diagram and parts you need is:
https://github.com/mikew123/ros2_pizero2w_dprg_ws/blob/main/images/Schematic_DPRG_ros_demo_2024-08-23.pdf