Posted 03 August 2026, Part 1 in this series laid out the strategy for adding vision processing capabilities to my 4-wheel robot. This post continues that effort. The first step was to replace the Teensy 3.6 main controller with a Teensy 4.1. As part of this process, I also replaced the glued-on Gnd and +5V [ ]
Posted 29 July 2026 In a prior post, Grok help me figure out why I was having so much trouble trying to change my Voron 2.4 printer from dock to no_dock configuration. Solving this problem exposed a pretty significant flaw in the way that config_switch.py managed the process of changing the printer.cfg file to reflect [ ]
In my old 4-wheel robot setup, I had a 5V regulator built around an LF50CV low-voltage dropout 3-pin regulator. Unfortunately, with the added current drain of the Pi5 and OAKD-Lite Camera, the LF50CV started dropping the output voltage to the point where the Pi5 started to get flaky. In discussing this with Grok, he suggested [ ]
Posted 25 July 2026 For quite a while I have used the accessories tray shown below, but I have become increasingly unhappy with the quality with it; in particular the small tray sections aren t quite big enough to handle all my USB sticks, micro-SD cards and holders, spring-clips, etc. So, after trying in vain to [ ]
Posted 08 July 2026 In this previous post, I describes my work with Grok Code to successfully demonstrate the use of vision processing with a Luxonis OAKD-Lite camera and a Raspberry Pi5 to generate best clear direction advisories for robot motion control. After achieving the above milestone, I started thinking about the next steps. Clearly [ ]
Posted 06 July 2026 After wrapping up the Wifi_OTA project described in this post, Grok Code and I moved on to the next big step integrating the Luxonis OAKD-Lite camera integrated into ROS (Robot Operating System) so the robot could take advantage of the ROS topic/subscriber strategy where a sensor like the OAKD-Lite camera [ ]
Posted 28 June 2026 When I work on significant projects like the vision-enhanced robot project, I generally hold two different but related mental maps for the overall project. One map describes the physical and/or logical entities that are needed for the overall project to succeed, such as wheel odometers, battery packs, power regulation/distribution, the OAKD-Lite [ ]
Posted 21 June 2026 After getting OTA via Bluetooth to the onboard HC-05 going for the 2-wheel robot, I had an epiphany; For vision processing the 2-wheel robot uses an on-board Raspberry Pi5 with a Wi-Fi connection to my local network (and thence to my PC), so why use the HC-05 link at all? The [ ]
This is the second of (hopefully) many posts on my project to add modern vision processing to my autonomous wall-following robot. The first post is here. Lots of changes since my first post. I discovered that my 8.4-to-5V LDO regulator board wouldn t reliably drive the Raspberry Pi5, so I had Grok look around for other [ ]
Posted 09 April 2026 Last month I decided it was time to put up a real flagpole to display the American flag in all its glory. Being an engineer, I had to research the heck out of the subject to make sure we got something we would be proud to have in our front yard. [ ]