Electronics and Broken Wi-Fi at the Hardware Meetup

I really thought I’d cracked it. I thought my shiny new Robot Wi-Fi hotspot would give all my robots squeaky clean connections and all would work.

Not so.

The robots persistently fell off the network. Just like last time. Most annoying. And after a lot of testing back home where they worked perfectly. Oh well. If I had a drawing board this might be a good time to go back to it.

The good news was that we had some impressive stuff on show. Ian had brought in a complete DSP rig which lets him “round trip signals” from a signal generator, through a DSP module and then back into the computer so that he can view the effects of his DSP code. Very impressive and super-useful if you want to tune the frequency response of your system to match particular environments. You can find out more about what he has been up to in Practical Electronics magazine. Meantime Ross was working on Hull pixelbot PICO migration and Brian had brought his robot arena system with him which proved extremely good at ball tracking. Soon all the robots will be “ball aware”. Just as long as I can get the network to, er, work.

The next Hardware Meetup will be on the 17th of September. All are welcome to turn up and discover if whatever changes I’m going to make will fix anything….