Xinabox Technology Summary - Kevin #9

Overview

In this blog post I am going to give a full overview of the experience we had using Xinabox and the various challenges and issue's we faced with the technology. Overall I think it's a good technology for Kids and engineers who are starting out to have a look at and try out, however, when it comes to this project or anything where you need reliable technology I would not recommend using Xinabox.




Positives

Firstly, let me go through some of the positives and information gathered from our experience with the technology.

  • Quick and Easy hardware setup
  • Plenty of online support and tutorials
  • Huge range of xChips
  • Good Microbit support
  • Good Makecode Extensions

Overall there were a lot of positives when we initially looked into using Xinabox, with plenty of examples of people using it in small household projects, and for teaching other people how to do program with makecode. Leading us to believe it would be an excellent choice for our USV project, especially since we were after functionality that allowed kids to interact with the project.

Negatives

On the other side of the coin their are a number of negatives to using Xinabox which make the technology to unreliable to work with our current project:

  • Unreliable Wifi
  • Unreliable GPS
  • Expensive
  • Safety Concerns
Unfortunately, after using the technology for a few weeks, it has not stood up to our expectations leading into it. Firstly, the wifi on the CW01 xChip is extremely unreliable, you can load your code onto the microbit and plug it into the Xinabox and it can work perfectly fine. Then sometimes it will just fail to connect to the Wifi through the CW01 xChip, this was encountered with both CW01 xChips we had. When this occurs, we can be waiting anywhere between 5 to 30 minutes for the CW01 to reconnect to the Wifi, leading us to keep retrying to connect and changing the code, and microbit etc.. to try anything we can to get it working.

To fix this issue, we tried bringing in a router instead of using mobile hotspots, this sadly did not improve the reliability of the Xinabox CW01 xChip. 

The second concern and issue we came across was the GPS on the SN01 xChip. The GPS needed to be in an open unobstructed area for between 10-20 minutes before it could connect and give you the location. Additionally, even when it was connected, it only updated every 2-4 seconds and could lose connection very easily if you go back inside or pass underneath an object.

Lastly, there are obvious safety concerns with this, as if we were attempting to keep track of a boat or even drive it via the cloud interface and we lose connection or need to wait a couple minutes before reconnecting the boat could crash in the meantime. 

Recommendation

In conclusion, I after using Xinabox for a few weeks I would highly recommend we move away from using it for this project due to the reasons mentioned above. Sinking any more time into it would be a waste of valuable resources with little to no time left in the semester. It is just to unreliable for our use case and will lead to causing more issue's than solutions in the field and for the consumer. 

Moving forward in the project however, we should turn to solutions that we know work and that have worked in the past. Namely, Beebotte as we know that has a reliable connection and our project lead has used it in the past.

Future Use

Overall, Xinabox is not a bad technology and I can see it's use case being very good for small projects, or for teaching kids how to program. I would recommend keeping them around as you don't know when they might be useful, they can be great for testing theory's and being a makeshift microbit internet connection in a hurry if needs be.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to: Tello drone to micro bit - Victor Alikberov, Blog#1

Image
1. Introduction. The purpose of this blog is to explain everything that is needed in order to connect tello drone to micro bit. It will cover wiring,  javascript code behind custom created tello extension and how to use this extension to connect and drive tello via microbit. 2. Wiring. Since tello drone creates its own wi-fi hotspot, additional wi-fi module is required in order to establish wireless connection between micro bit and tello. ESP8266 will be used to connect micro bit to tello wi-fi hotspot and also to establsih UDP communications between micro bit and drone. The pinout of the ESP8266 chip is shown below. ESP8266 chip pinout. Receiving port (Rx) is connected to transmitting port of the micro bit (pin 2) and transmitting port (Tx) of the ESP8266 is connected to receiving port of the micro bit (pin 1).  3.3 volts power supply should be provided both to micro bit and ESP8266 chip. Chip enable port is also connected to 3.3v power supply.  ESP8266 plus microbi...
Read more

Colour Tracking With OpenCV - Jack Pender, Blog #4

Image
  Introduction: As part of this project, the Tello drone is intended to locate anyone in danger in the water and transmit this location for the USV to travel to so it can perform a rescue. Having accessed the camera feed from the Tello and displaying it where it can be monitored, the next step was to have it implement some form of tracking. For test purposes it was decided to detect the colour green. OpenCV: The colour tracking was to be implemented in OpenCV and so I simply had to edit the python file that was running the livestream. The first step of this was to import the numpy library as this would be used to calculate the area of the detected green object. This library would also allow me to set the range of colours that the Tello was to detect. It does so by creating an array of RBG values ([22,60,200] and [60,255,255] in my case) that OpenCV can use to detect these specific colours and everything that falls in between. Here I am using these values as the brightest and ...
Read more

Tello and OpenCV - Jack Pender, Blog #3

Image
  Introduction: One of the main aspects of this project is to use a drone to locate people who are in danger in the water, then transmitting this location to the USV so that it can make its way there. The first step of this was to get the camera feed from the Tello drone and stream this to a computer, in this case, mine. In order to do this my first task was to research the topic online and see if there was anything I could use. Luckily, there was. First Steps: There happened to be a few tutorials online, from articles to YouTube videos, that were able to help me get started. The first step in this process is connecting to the Wi-Fi network of the Tello drone, in order to stream its camera feed via OpenCV. This is a public Wi-Fi network, so it’s very quick and easy to connect to. Then came the python programming using OpenCV in order to actually get the camera feed from the drone. The tutorials that I found allowed this setup to be very easy. Firstly, you set up the parameter...
Read more