servo on the inet

woo. i got a servo working over the inet. it's even wireless. it's quite the crazy setup. well. if you don't count the 3 power adapters plugged into it. doh.

getting it working was mostly trouble-free minus...

my servo controller servo8t documentation being crazy. ok interpret this..

>11a23

meaning module 1, servo 1 at absolute position 23. ok the doc says this. the problem is.. how is that 23 encoded? is it 2 bytes of text? that is crazy, but it must be because we are talking about serial transfers. well. it's not. it's a single byte just like it should be.

second problem.. sun decided that windows is not a cool enough a platform for them to support it fully anymore with java. so at some point recently they decided to have the javax.comm api only available for solaris and linux. what the hell? worse they decided that you would not want old versions either so they deleted them from the site. luckily the inet is teh king and saved the day.

www.z425.com/videos/video_2005dec27_0005.asf

i was lazy and just used the tini webserver classes so i could just post values from a browser. the robot will always have a webserver because that is just awesome and everything should have a webserver, but it just will use it for random configuration type things. typically it'll be accessed directly with sockets.

at some point i'll also get rid of the servo controller and have the TINI doing the work along with some random chips to do the grunt work of generating PWM for it. for now i might as well just use the servo controller because i have it.

a ping to the TINI is about 20ms. that's crap (not all the TINI's fault). however, i am going to try and pull this off even with crap latency. leveraging the users home computer is a dramatic cost savings. i want the guy to be very, very inexpensive and using a $10 microcontroller (not the TINI (i think it's $20 in quantities) to do busy work instead of a real onboard CPU doing all the work helps that a long way.