Although the Orangutan has an 8-character x 2-line liquid crystal display, I'm finding it tough to debug my AI and sonar troubles. I write messages to the screen but without history, I miss the important stuff and end up having to repeat the test over and over and over. I'm looking at using the serial port for writing debug messages.I tried Atmel's AVR Studio that's an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for writing and debugging AVR® applications in Windows® 9x/NT/2000/XP environments. But since I use Linux, not Windows I've had a few difficulties getting it going using Wine. I need to spend some time getting this going cause I'd much rather use an IDE than an editor, Make files, and print statements. On my to-do list.
In the mean time ... Why spend time fixing a problem when another interesting gadget is waiting to be played with?
When I was mucking with the Gumstix controller, the idea of using Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi to remotely communicate was pretty cool. Alas, the Orangutan doesn't have cheap wireless options. Or does it?
Digi's Xbee RF Modules sound really interesting. Low-cost, low-power mesh networking for about ~$25 each. Sparkfun has a good selection of the various Xbee flavours. The 2mW Series 2.5 Wire Antenna version has a 400' range and is the one that I have my eye on.
Here's today's plan:
- Get 2 Xbees
- An Arduino Xbee Shield to interface to the Orangutan
- An Xbee Explorer USB to interface to my PC
