USV Cloud Driving - Kevin #6

Introduction

This blog entry will go through the process the team undertook to get a working "Hello World" example of an analogue input coming from Ubidots down to a motor to control it's speed. This was a major aspect of work to figure out for the project and I worked with a team member from another class to get it working.

It was really good getting to work with someone from a different area of knowledge and bouncing work off each other and learning how to combine the work we had both done, it took a lot of communication and teamwork to get this aspect of the project working. I had done a lot of work with Ubidots at this point and knew how to get value's down to Microbits, my team member had done a lot of work with radio signals between Microbits and sending and receiving value's between Microbits and to the motors. It was now time to combine the two to get a message from Ubidots to a Motor through the Microbits.

Ubidots

The first step in the process was for me to get an analogue input down from Ubidots to the Microbit. I designed a Manual input panel on Ubidots that allows the user to input any value between 0 and 4 and set it up to send a value to the Microbit. Ubidots only has one widget that's capable of sending a value to a device and the values can only be numeric or strings. Additionally it had very limited capability of changing the look of the manual input box, this was something I found was a negative aspect of Ubidots. 



Setting up the Manual input to send a value to the Microbit was when we ran into our first issue. The time for Ubidots to send the value back to the Microbit took between 5 and 30 seconds and varied heavily. Which is far to long, especially for attempting to drive a USV in real time from a cloud platform. We realised for the cloud we will need to pre-set a course of action that the USV needs to take and send this before it starts it's journey if we were going to use Ubidots. However, we still wanted to get a proof of concept working to show driving is possible from the cloud, we continued forward and got a working value from Ubidots to the Microbit through the manual input box on the dashboard.

While working on this section, I was showing and explaining different aspects of Ubidots to my other team member who hadn't worked with the technology previously.

Radio and Motor

Next, it was my time to learn my teammate showed me how all the communication works with radio signals and sending values to and from the motors via the Microbits. I found this really really interesting to learn about and see how it all worked, and got my own version working on my laptop, for sending values between microbits. 


We ran into an issue with the microbit we were using for the motor, we initially wanted to use one microbit to take the message off of Ubidots and start the motor running, but we couldn't have the Microbit connected to the Xinabox xChips and the motor. 

Issue's and Debugging

To solve this issue we decided to use two different Microbits and communicate between the two. My teammate was very good at setting up the radio signals between the two Microbits and after us doing some trial and error we eventually got it working. 

I was able to click a button on Ubidots and after about 30 seconds the motor would move around. This was amazing to see, especially ahead of the water test.

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