Today we have a cool application from one of our Application Engineers, Evan Dozier. To summarize, he found an old robotic arm with a broken controller and revamped it using NI Hardware, LabVIEW and the Wiimote controller from the Nintendo Wii.
The Wiimote is a fairly sophisticated piece of engineering itself (we hope to post more about it in the future). It uses Bluetooth to communicate data from several on-board accelerometers. This informs the software of the Wiimote's orientation and movement.
In this application, Evan uses the Wiimote and some special Bluetooth LabVIEW VIs to control the robot either with the buttons or with the accelerometers.
If you would like to try this yourself (and you have a spare Wiimote and robotic arm), go to the LabVIEW forums and download the VIs by clicking on the link.
Link to forums with Wiimote VIs
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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2 comments:
Somebody asked me what hardware Evan was using. He was using one of our old (and I think obsolete) stepper motor drives called the nuDrive. I imagine he used that because it was what was on hand. Our newer drives are the MID760x series drives that are a lot more compact but can't drive as large a motor as the old nuDrives. The motion controller he used was the PCI-7354 which is a really nice stepper or servo motion controller that can do a lot of cool stuff.
Where is that? I see the MSU banner in the background, and I went there. Just wondering...
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