Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

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juancgarcia
 
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Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

Post by juancgarcia »

Hi.

I want to build out some animatronic characters and effects for a home tiki bar. My main goal is to orchestrate everything wirelessly from a computer (or even just a pi), and have all the individual characters or effects mostly be standalone dumb listeners always waiting for instructions. The coordinator program on the computer will parse and step through some kind of timecoded "script" and broadcast commands that would translate to something like "Unit A, activate light for 3sec, then stop" or "Unit B, move neck 70deg left slow" or "All devices, go into lurk mode". I'm sure I can formalize some command syntax when I have a better idea of what I can work with.

What devices come to mind if you wanted to build this?

I picked up a few Feather M0 RFM69HCW to play with but I ran into space issues trying to load libraries for both the radio and the servo libraries for the 8-Channel PWM/Servo FeatherWing in CircuitPython. Also I didn't get far enough to try, but (last time I checked) CircuitPython lacks interrupts for the radio and that has got to be an issue for responding to the sequence commands timely.

Would really prefer to code in CircuitPython, but if the right micros and add-ons for this only talk C, I'll try my best.


Thanks for any suggestions.

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Franklin97355
 
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Re: Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

Post by Franklin97355 »

I'm no expert but I've seen some of the time-dependent code written in c in line with the Python code. You might look into using more controllers and dedicate them to single tasks. It's just an idea off the top of my head so it might be in the clouds.

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juancgarcia
 
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Re: Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

Post by juancgarcia »

That might be what I have to do. Maybe one to handle the radio stack and parse the commands, and another to handle the server/motor controller. Glued together with I2C, I guess.

Or maybe in pure C I have more headroom to do it all in one? Wonder if anybody knows whether I can target my existing RFM69HCW feather boards with C binaries or if I need different gear altogether.

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pburgess
 
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Re: Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

Post by pburgess »

Yeah, unfortunately the M0 boards are space-constrained as more stuff is built into CircuitPython now. If you want to keep going with the same hardware, C would be the best bet (both headroom-wise and with interrupts)…but I totally understand the Python preference!

If willing to start fresh, I’d suggest experimenting on a small scale with something ESP32-based, see how that goes. In the past there was a tendency to avoid WiFi for time-critical stuff as channels were crowded, routers were flaky, etc., but it’s been a while now and robustitude has improved.

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juancgarcia
 
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Re: Adafruit Gear for Wireless Animatronics?

Post by juancgarcia »

@pburgess, I'm gonna try to give it another go in python with the radios I've got, only this time trying to split the load across multiple micros. Maybe the interrupt timing I'm worried about will be negligible, gotta see.

I ordered a few QT PY2040s. Plan is to have the radio boards just listen to incoming packets, and as an i2c host, relay some text or binary blob command to the 2040 listening via I2Cperipheral. The 2040 runs the servos via it's I2C host.

Might be way more trouble than it's worth, but I wanted to give python one last try before falling back to C.

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