We have been communicating with our MFG to see what options are currently available for shipping. Unfortunately, there are still some snags with the LOGI-EDU and the LOGI-Bone, which they state are being worked out.  They have struggled to acquire all of the final parts needed for the LOGI-EDU and the LOGI-Bone. They are in the final stages of the completion for the LOGI-Cam and the LOGI-Pi Boards.

The most recent dates for shipping given to us from our MFG:

• LOGI-Pi Ready for shipping on Monday May 19
• LOGI-Cam Ready for shipping on Monday May 19  
• LOGI-Bone Expected to ship by end of May
• LOGI-EDU Expected to ship by end of May

For those that are LOGI-Pi and LOGI-Cam backers, your packages will be shipping starting monday May 19. For those backers whose packages contain LOGI-EDU and or LOGI-Bone, the shipping will begin at the end of May (based upon the latest information received from the MFG - hope it sticks!).

We are sorry for the delay and acknowledge that we have indeed fallen prey to some of the pitfalls and timelines for MFG. We are learning and hope to continue to improve based on our experiences. We hope to make up for this in the long run and hope that you are happy with the boards.

We will ask that the MFG ship the boards with some extra packaging to ensure that they do not get damaged during shipping. We have been informed by some of the earlybird users that the boxes received had taken a pretty good beating, though the boards were intact.

Skeleton Editor - Graphical HDL Editor update

We have continued our effort in developing an easy-to-use graphical HDL editor that will allow users to easily create their customized HDL projects using the LOGI drivers. You can access and experiment with the skeleton editor at the following link. We have created a new video with a walk through and overview of the editor at the following link. Additionally there is a new wiki page with the step by step guide of creating your own HDL projects using the Skeleton Editor

• LOGI-Pi Skeleton Editor
• LOGI-Bone Skeleton Editor
• Skeleton Editor wiki guide and documentation
• Skeleton Editor Youtube Video Overview and walk through

Sparkfun AVC 2014 Status Update - LOGI-UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle)

We are hard at work to get a vehicle ready to participate in the Sparkfun AVC 2014. Our latest work target the next two topics following with an overview.

• GPS Waypoint Navigation  
• FPGA-based PID controller

The LOGI-UGV software will be entirely programmed in python, which requires that we find a simple (yet efficient) way to navigate GPS waypoints without performing heavy/complicated arithmetic. State of the art waypoint navigation methods either work by extracting bearing and distance directly from GPS data or by converting GPS and waypoint data into a linear Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) space. One advantage of using the UTM space is that you can then work directly on X,Y coordinates. Unfortunately, the conversion from GPS (NMEA) data to the UTM space is quite complicated. Therefore the approach we have chosen is to consider the plan tangent to the earth sphere at the course coordinates. For small distances (The AVC course fits in a 60x60m area) the curvature of the earth can be neglected.

 

 The conversion from the GPS coordinates (NMEA) to these local coordinates only requires two subtraction and two multiplication instructions (plus the conversion from degree-minute to degree-decimal) thanks to the small angle approximation of the sine function. All these approximations give a small error for the course area, and these errors will be absorbed by the GPS positioning error (3m at best).

 

 The AVC course Waypoints.kml file plotted in the local coordinates system

To navigate the LOGI-UGV, we plan to use the FPGA not only to generate control signals (PWM for motor and servo) and read sensor (GPS, sonar, gyro) but also to manage high-rate PID control for the speed control and maybe steering control (using gyro). PID control on the motor will help us to position the robot and drive it at a precise pace. The PID logic is already implemented using information athttp://crap.gforge.inria.fr/doc2.php (its in french, but google translate should work fine) and we have a rather simple encoder reading logic. We improved the encoder reading logic to get better accuracy and to be more error prone. This PID logic and encoder logic will first be tested using a standalone motor with encoder connected to the LOGI board and will then be adapted to the AVC platform with homemade hall effect encoders.

LOGI-Bone Kernel integration of LOGI-Tools

After some work, the LOGI-Bone Tools support has made its way into the official beaglebone(black) kernel patch list. If you go to https://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-dev and have a look at the patch folder of the am33x-v3.8 branch you’ll see all the logibone related patches. This means that the LOGI-Bone support will be integrated in the future official debian/ubuntu images! For the early-bird adopters, following the information on the wiki page (http://valentfx.com/wiki/index.php?title=Logi-Bone_Quick_Start_Guide#First_boot_of_the_logi-image_-_auto_setup_device-tree) will setup the cape identification EEPROM so that the kernel module and device-tree configuration can be loaded at boot time.

HummingBoard compatibility

A new very powerful development board will hit the market soon (http://imx.solid-run.com/wiki/index.php?title=HummingBoard_Hardware) and its designers chose the Raspberry-Pi form factor and Raspberry-Pi expansion port layout! The board sports a quad-core IMX.6 Freescale processor, 2GB or RAM, SATA, Gigabit ethernet, USB, HDMI … which should give plenty of computation power and IO to drive the most demanding applications. We are waiting to get a sample of this board and hope to soon list the Humming board in our support list for the LOGI-Pi board.

Thanks for your continued support and we look forward to helping your get up to speed with using the LOGI Boards soon! As always feel free to drop us a line at support@valentfx.com or drop by and say hi on our new forums forum.valentfx.com.

Cheers,  

The LOGI-Team