Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Robot runs on MSP430 + OLPC XO - QA and updated bundle request
Yama, This is really great. And thanks for updating the wiki (sorry about the cold, though). Can you provide specifics on the hardware/frame for the robot? Thanks. Gerald On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 9:20 PM, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com wrote: Bouncy robot powered by mspgcc+olpc/Sugar+msp430 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jrNkWtavM So far mspdebug Linux tools work in OLPC's XO computer using the directions in http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OLPC_XO-1 (major overhaul today, courtesy of a cold/flu) 1) I beg mspdebug people to vet excessive heresies this noob might have introduced in the How-To in that page. So far I am managing without -mcu - or -gdb. I actually have no idea what those are for, or if their unavailability explains my so far failure to UART, or if we should care... (for many things, it ain't broken...) 2) Fedora packaging people: any way to package mspdebug msp430-libc msp430-binutils msp430-gcc msp430mcu msp430-gdb ? What gets downloaded through yum channels in the XO is very, very outdated, and conflicts (cf. mcu and libc). Please feel free to forward, as I have no access to real Fedora people - don't even know where to look for them without making a nuisance of myself and undue noise, and certainly do not know who could maybe make a package(?) usable for the XO. Will this be fixable for the next OLPC OS? Daniel? 3) Robotics, Science, Sensors OLPC, IAEP people, please, if you could test the GCC toolchain? You do not need to have a Launchpad on hand. I am trying to catch bugs and usability issues. Are the instructions clear? as much as possible figuring out snags so it's easier for kids and normal people. *robot* The brains of this bouncy are an MSP430 microcontroller (a lowly g2152) controlling a L293 dual H bridge, senses two switches. Its brawn a couple geared DC motors on 9V PWM in an askjerry tricycle frame. Not counting shipping, less than USD $10 total. Coded in an XO-1 all the way. Enormous thanks to the mspgcc folks that helped me figure things like how to use more than one switch... ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Introduction: teacher interested in SOAS
Kevin Pato, Thanks so much for the heads-up around this issue. These are definitely issues I was thinking about. I've spoken to our after-school coordinator about getting together a small group to trial this with, and she is pretty excited about the idea. 1. What size of USB will you use? Last year we had a usb donation drive for our older students who use them in the standard way. It was an overwhelming success, yielding far more than we need for the older students, and drives in all shapes and sizes. I've been using 2 gig drives in my testing, but I can see how that would fill up fast with the video recording activity. We took videos of our traditional rhymes. I love these! More importantly I think the more traditional teachers at my school would love it too! Too bad my spanish is so poor! 2. Will your computers boot from USB? I've already confirmed that I can configure the BIOS to boot from USB if present! No problem here. 3. Sticks will fail at a high rate. As I mentioned in my first post, we have about a 20% failure rate on our sticks every sessions. Yesterday, one student had to try 3 sticks before we got one that would work. This is pretty distressing to me, as a reliable persistant save space is really the biggest reason for doing this in my book. Hopefully with the benefit of your experience we can improve on that 20% figure. This means we always take a lot of back-ups. Can I infer from this that the XS server does some sort of automated backup? I've been trying to figure out how essential the server is, and whether it is worth the effort to set up, but that's probably a discussion better suited to the SOAS tech list. We were able to figure out that one computer was the problem, not the sticks, so be prepared to be methodical in tracking the sticks and computers. Did you figure out what the issue was with the PC? Do I need to bother with tracking if all PCs are hardware identical? The problem diminished some when we teach these students the meaning of the flashing LED on the usb. If you had blinked, you had to wait. My notion is that I will train the students to watch the PC's power light rather than the read/write light on the USB stick. Possible rhyme for remembering to do so: Don't take it BACK until the light goes BLACK! Thanks so much for the advice. I will keep in touch as the project progresses, with blog entries to come! -John ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-11-25
== Sugar Digest == 1. Google Code-In [1] begins tomorrow. It is not too late to sign up as a mentor [2] and to recruit students to participate [3]. While many of the tasks [4] involve programming, there are also documentation, design, and research tasks. This is a great opportunity for Sugar Labs to recruit its next generation of developers. 2. Sugar Labs is holding its annual election to the oversight board early next month. If you are interested in running for one of the open board seats, open to any community member, please feel free to contact me or the membership committee with any questions before 7 December. === Tech Talk === 3. Daniel Narvaez has made a number of improvements to sugar-build [5], which has by-and-large replaced sugar-jhbuild as the preferred development environment for Fedora and Ubuntu. === Sugar Labs === Visit our planet [6] for more updates about Sugar and Sugar deployments. -walter -- Walter Bender Sugar Labs http://www.sugarlabs.org [1] http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012 [2] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GoogleCodeIn2012/Participate#Mentors [3] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GoogleCodeIn2012/Participate#Students [4] http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/GoogleCodeIn2012#Tasks [5] http://sugarlabs.org/~dnarvaez/sugar-docs [6] http://planet.sugarlabs.org ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] Sugar Digest 2012-11-25
On Sun, 25 Nov 2012 19:43:35 -0500 Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote: 3. Daniel Narvaez has made a number of improvements to sugar-build [5], which has by-and-large replaced sugar-jhbuild as the preferred development environment for Fedora and Ubuntu. Congratulations to Daniel Narvaez, who does this very important work. Specially where jhbuild stops to work properly always. Something I don't like completely is that people can contribute to Sugar only from Ubuntu or Fedora, but knowing that jhbuild stopped working in Ubuntu and Debian, it's a terrific improvement. A new important step would be support other up-to-date GNU/Linux distros souch as Debian Testing, ArchLinux, Gentoo, et al. But that should come from the Sugar contributors who use those other distros. Cheers, Daniel. ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
[IAEP] Notice to GCI mentors
Dear GCI mentors for Sugar Labs, First, thank you for volunteering your time and effort to help the GCI participants to help Sugar Labs and our users. The GCI website will open to student sign-up shortly, so we can expect to begin seeing requests from students to take on tasks. The purpose of GCI is to help foster the next generation of FOSS contributors, so I think we should maintain high standards in judging the completeness and acceptance of their submissions, although not unreasonably so. Please note that the timeliness of replies for action requests (assign tasks, mark as complete, etc.) are very important. A student is prevented from moving on to request another task while they have a task open, so it is critical that students be given the courtesy of rapid reviews of their work. Warmest Regards, cjl ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
Re: [IAEP] [support-gang] Robot runs on MSP430 + OLPC XO - QA and updated bundle request
Thank you for the interest, Gerald. I have uploaded a circuit diagram, and will be working on explaining what's what there BTW, I did the drawing on an XO 1, using Inkscape in Gnome. Slower than the quad core, but works! http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/Bouncy_Robot_Linux_code let's ask Jerry (no pun: his website is http://askjerry.info) for the frame design - he has also a nifty tractor body design there. Hey Jerry! do you have handy the blueprint of the tricycle that we may share it with the friends here? Thanks! On 11/25/2012 08:32 AM, Dr. Gerald Ardito wrote: Yama, This is really great. And thanks for updating the wiki (sorry about the cold, though). Can you provide specifics on the hardware/frame for the robot? Thanks. Gerald On Sat, Nov 24, 2012 at 9:20 PM, Yama Ploskonka yamap...@gmail.com mailto:yamap...@gmail.com wrote: Bouncy robot powered by mspgcc+olpc/Sugar+msp430 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-jrNkWtavM So far mspdebug Linux tools work in OLPC's XO computer using the directions in http://processors.wiki.ti.com/index.php/OLPC_XO-1 (major overhaul today, courtesy of a cold/flu) 1) I beg mspdebug people to vet excessive heresies this noob might have introduced in the How-To in that page. So far I am managing without -mcu - or -gdb. I actually have no idea what those are for, or if their unavailability explains my so far failure to UART, or if we should care... (for many things, it ain't broken...) 2) Fedora packaging people: any way to package mspdebug msp430-libc msp430-binutils msp430-gcc msp430mcu msp430-gdb ? What gets downloaded through yum channels in the XO is very, very outdated, and conflicts (cf. mcu and libc). Please feel free to forward, as I have no access to real Fedora people - don't even know where to look for them without making a nuisance of myself and undue noise, and certainly do not know who could maybe make a package(?) usable for the XO. Will this be fixable for the next OLPC OS? Daniel? 3) Robotics, Science, Sensors OLPC, IAEP people, please, if you could test the GCC toolchain? You do not need to have a Launchpad on hand. I am trying to catch bugs and usability issues. Are the instructions clear? as much as possible figuring out snags so it's easier for kids and normal people. *robot* The brains of this bouncy are an MSP430 microcontroller (a lowly g2152) controlling a L293 dual H bridge, senses two switches. Its brawn a couple geared DC motors on 9V PWM in an askjerry tricycle frame. Not counting shipping, less than USD $10 total. Coded in an XO-1 all the way. Enormous thanks to the mspgcc folks that helped me figure things like how to use more than one switch... ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org mailto:support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ support-gang mailing list support-g...@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/support-gang ___ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) IAEP@lists.sugarlabs.org http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
