In my IOT Stack, a Raspberry Pi with an external connected disk serves as a SAMBA server. Before installing the system, I wanted to see the performance differences of various disk, their read speed, and their local and remote, via SAMBA, write speed. This article briefly shows how to measure…

In this article, I show how to write a simple heartbeat script that runs regularly on your laptop, desktop computer or IOT device to signal that it is still operational. To store and process the data, we need an IOTstack consisting of MQTT, NodeRed and InfluxDB — see my earlier…

A custom IOT stack running on a Raspberry Pi is an effective way to start with adding and reading sensor data or the entry to home automation. The first article in this series showed how to install a complete stack of IOT software, namely MQTT for receiving, NodeRed for…

A custom IOT stack at home delivers a handy way to publish and record data from a wide variety of sensors. With additional software, you can visualize the data, access dashboards remotely, and even control some sensors. All you need is a Raspberry Pi 3B+ or 4 and a SSD…

It’s been more than a year working on my robot RADU. I could not get all of its goals fulfilled, and sadly, the robot is not autonomous. The journey itself was intricate, challenging, mostly fun with some rough edges. This article summarizes the project, recaps the goals and their fulfillments…

My robot RADU is a two wheeled robot that combines custom hardware for the sensor and motor, a Raspberry Pico and L293D motor shield, and a purchasable robotic arm that is controlled via a Raspberry Pi shield. For both parts of the robot, I want to use the same control…

After finally dropping ROS from the software stack, I continued with my robot build essentially where I left off half a year ago: A two wheeled, Raspberry Pico controlled vehicle that listens to commands via a Gamepad that are translated to movements messages. Then, I rebuild the robot, added the…

A mobile robot offers many interfaces for controlling. In my project RADU, a two-wheel movable robot, I implemented a wrap for movements commands from the Robot Operating System ROS. Commands have two parts in which we are interested: The linear velocity in meter/second, which moves the robot along its x-axis…

When using the Robot Operating System, nodes are started, topics published, messages send. Internally, the ROS nodes use these messages to communicate with each other. Now, if you build a robot that uses ROS as the communication middleware, you need to write custom code which will parse these messages and…