Project in history – Going wireless for a Tamiya kit

This project is completed around 2011. It may look ancient as everyone is crazy about “Drone” today. Nevertheless, it brought me so much fun doing it I am still fond of the good memories today and would like to share here.

The goal back then was simple. A wired Tamiya kit + Arduino + bluetooth + Android phone = Wireless remote controlled bulldozer. Integrate the wireless and accelerometer capability from an Android phone to control this kit. As far as I can recall there was no such term as STEM back then but this sort of project can been seen in those syllabuses today on this exciting subject.

The name Tamiya must ring the bell for everyone who had get their feet wet in the remote control modelling world. Tamiya made great kits at very reasonable price for beginners to moderates. I was lucky enough to own and build one of their classic – a bulldozer kit – many years ago and it remained one of the best part of my memory although that bulldozer itself is nowhere to be seen now.

The below is about pretty much the same kit I came across from Tamiya around 2011 which is Xmas gift from my wife.

The finished mods. It is a Bluetooth enabled Tamiya kit that can be controlled from an Android phone.

The Tamiya kit came with a perfect wired On-Off switches to control the kit for forward-backward-left-right maneuvers.

The classic kit I had decades ago (also from Tamiya) is of a wooden base, with metal gears. They are now replaced as plastic that are easier to work with but honestly I still missed the wood and metal. By the way, no power drill is needed for the classic kit with wood, I built mine comfortably with screwdriver and brute force.

The core that made it possible from wired to wireless is an Arduino Mega board. Mounted with ease to the baseboard (white) on the Tamiya kit.

The Communication module is an HC-05 Bluetooth board alongside with the H-bride (SN754410) on an Arduino compatible extension board. The design was pretty standard to divide the control circuit from the power circuit that have to drive two 3V motors with power requirements the Arduino board cannot handle.

Prototype in testing.

A variation configuration using a mobile phone mounted on the kit and via WIFI to stream the real-time video, and have the control of the kit via Bluetooth from the viewing PC. It is a very popular mods back then and the experience of controlling a MARS Rover at home is simply fantastic.

LU decomposition in TI-84

As an extension to a previous entry on doing LU decomposition in Nspire and R, the TI-84 is covered here. There is no built-in function like in the Nspire for this, but there are many programs available online, with most of them employing a simple Doolittle algorithm without pivoting.

The non-pivoting program described here for the TI-84 series is with a twist. No separate L and U matrix variables are used and the calculations are done in place with the original input matrix A. The end result of both L and U are also stored in this input matrix. This is made possible by the property of the L and U matrices in this decomposition are triangular. Therefore, at the little price of some mental interpretation of the program output, this program will take up less memory and run a little faster than most simple LU decomposition programs online for the same class of calculator. From a simple benchmark with a 5 x 5 matrix, this program took 2 seconds while another standard program took 2.7 seconds.

The input matrix A.

Results are stored in the same matrix.

L, U, and verification.

Unit conversion quirks in TI Nspire

The TI Nspire calculator provided a rich set of common units from area, length, mass, etc. Units start with an understore in Nspire, for example, kg is represented as _kg. User are free to create their own units. On the desktop version of the Nspire software, a short cut for the conversion symbol (► ) is “@>”.

Recently over a conversation with a friend living overseas we are curious of the lowest we can get for a cut of meat at our own places. I am getting 12 per 500 gm on discount a few days ago. He gets 7.8 per 1 lb at best.

Some mental calculations for we have different units, but I decided to fire up the Nspire for this inequality to see what will happen:

Alas, doesn’t work. Obviously I was expecting a boolean. The more verbose inequality with some pre-calculation didn’t work either.

That’s where I realize Nspire might not be handling unit in equations the way we expected. An easy fix of course is to times a common unit (e.g. _kg) on both sides, but that pretty much defeat the whole purpose of simplicity of calculations of this kind.