Solar mower charger

My 2013 mowbot (2.2) now includes a working solar battery charging system. The batteries are full, but they only provide the propulsion, not the cutting power, so it still requires gasoline.

There have been a mess of improvements made since I last updated the "Robot Mower" page above, and I am obviously terrible at documenting things like this, so here are some nice lists for your enjoyment. 

Mowbot 2.3 feature list

• Solar power charger
• 110v wall charger
• 5ghz video feed
• Grass bagging option
• Adjustable cutting height

Future features list

• 24v alternator / generator charger
• more cameras
• remote kill servo 
• better traction (tank treads or bigger tires)

The solar panel was donated by my mom's neighbor (thanks!) and outputs around 19 volts under full sun. This thing must have been old, because it came with aluminum wiring, which I found odd. My mowbot gets propelled by 24 volt DC motors, so the panel alone won't do me much good. 

Inside the toolbox (at the front of the mower) all of the electronics sit somewhat protected from the elements. From left to right you can see the battery "fuel" gauge, charger enable/disable switch, charger ammeter, 110 volt wall charger input, brake controls and 2.4ghz receiver (RX). The antenna in the middle belongs to a 5ghz video transmitter (TX) providing a video feed to my nonexistent base station. There is also a camera mounted just under the toolbox, facing forward, providing the video stream.

On the inside of the toolbox you can see my collection of "brain" components for the mowbot, which are charging components (left side) the motor controller (middle) and power distribution. The solar panel puts out around 19 volts DC to a small red board in the middle, which steps the voltage up to 30 volts DC. Under the red board is a black box containing a DC to DC solar battery charger, which manages applying power (or not) to the batteries to maintain a full charge.

Generator Cabinet

My generator is noisy. This box should help keep it quiet. It is also made to look like a crate that would store wild beasts.

CB radio base

Converting a NAVY ship radio to CB, slowly.

Can sign progress

This is an art project for burning flipside 2013. The sign is composed mostly of aluminum cans and glue, and is about 20% complete here.

mowbot 2.0 lives!

It has been about a year since Mowbot 1.0, or RALF, came to life, and I have not done much with it (other than mowing) for the last year. I decided to add some features, which required a new mowing deck, so I am advancing the hardware to 2.0

I started with a new deck and 1 inch square tubing.

 

 After many hours, I have added a control panel (the toolbox), grass catcher, adjustable height, and master power switch. 

It mows quite nicely, but the back wheels do not get very good traction. I will soon be swapping out the battery and control panel positions to try and put some more weight over the rear wheels.

Videos coming soon.

compiling seagull on ubuntu 10.10

Seagull is a free, Open Source (GPL) multi-protocol traffic generator test tool. I will be using Seagull to generate some Diameter traffic for testing. After trying for hours to get this software to compile under Ubuntu, I finally gave up and used the windows cygwin binarys, which worked like a charm.

Seagull is a handy tool for generating very specific traffic types, and provides many scenarios already configured. To get going on Windows, all that I had to do was edit the IP addresses in some XML config files and I was up and running. Nice. 

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I'll document some of the pains that I went through here during compilation under Ubuntu 10.10 for Seagull in case someone else happens to try this out. There has been some time since Seagull was updated, and compilers have changed a bit since then. Fortunately I ran into this blog post that helped me to understand some of the problems that I was running into. 


At first, KSH and GCC are missing from Ubuntu, so you have to install them.

# apt-get install ksh build-essential bison flex libntl-dev libsctp-dev

Source files that generate the error "error: memset was not declared in this scope" need to have this include line added. 
#include <cstring>

Source files that generate the error "X" need to have this include line added.

#include <cstdlib>


Source files that generate the error "Y" need to have = changed to == in some if statements. 

Source files that generate the error "fatal error: asm/page.h: No such file or directory" need to have a specific include line to point at the actual page.h file. From http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=190186.
#include "/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.35-22/arch/x86/include/asm/page.h"

Source files that generate the error "/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lTTL" can be fixed by commenting a line and uncommenting a line in TCAP section of build.conf.

And lastly, I have not yet solved this one. Error message is "library-trans-extsctp/socketSCTP_t.hpp:23: fatal error: ext_socket.h: No such file or directory". I cant seem to find a library that provides sctp_initLibrary() as  ext_socket.h used to, also cant find ext_socket.h on my system or in an available package.

So, use the windows version, because it works. 

the diameter protocol

Diameter is an authentication, authorization and accounting protocol for computer networks, and an alternative to RADIUS.









Anyway, here are some links.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diameter_(protocol)
• http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3588
• http://www.freediameter.net/trac/wiki/Configuration
• http://aaa.koganei.wide.ad.jp/documentation/fD_tuto_2e%20-%20Quickstart%20a%20testbed.pdf

For troubleshooting diameter, I have mostly been using tcpdump and wireshark since wireshark has dissectors for the Diameter protocol. Next I will be working on tcpdump filters.