Web Site Bugs Fixed

At last, the mysterious web site bugs have been fixed! Thursday night I got the urge to work on the robot website. It was more of me wanting to add my smart outlet to the site. I will post about the smart outlet soon. I had two bugs on the site, one of which I've had for a year.

YawCam

Last month I decided to improve the streaming software for the video feeds from my robots. Thus far I have been using Active WebCam which I've had good success, minus a few things. So I set out to find something else.

Robot Control Web Site

Since SBot 1, I have been working on a web site to control my robot. This way any platform can control it as long as it has a browser. Eventually I may create specific apps for Android/iPhone just for the experience of mobile app development as I have not had the opportunity.

I recently added forms based authencation. Before it would prompt for login. The back end uses Active Directory.

 This is the control site for SBot 1. You can see a tab for JBot1. That is an implementation I setup to use java to refresh the images so they are smoother but doesn't work for mobile.

Control site for Sbot 2 which doesn't have all the controls yet.

I started with the simple ASP.Net example in Visual Studio 2010 and went from there.

The video is shown using an application called Active WebCam from PY Software which is running on my computer. I have two A/V receivers connected to my computer via two USB capture devices. The images are then saved to my web server. I will post some pictures of the receivers soon.

Let me know want you think. Any ideas or improvements would be greatly appreciated!

Week of 07/24/2011 and 07/31/2011

Even though this week isn't over, I still wanted to post my current progress since during the week of July 17, most of my time was spent packing for Comic-Con in San Diego. It was an awesome trip and I will probably post pictures soon. I wasn't able to blog about it or my robot again last week because with travelling, plus that many people at the Con, and lack of sleep, illness struck so I was out sick most of the week.

So far, this week, I was able to make some progress. Me and my girlfriend have started a schedule to get us back into a weeknight routine so that we can work on projects and other to-do's that get set aside.

Last night I decided to work on the website and add video camera control buttons. After a lot of research I was able to add buttons that increment the angle. The thing that made it difficult was to retain the current position during each HTTP post. I ended up using Session State to store the values. This sets the framework for storage other variables for other functionally. In the future I may use Application State so that if more than one user is using it or I come back to the camera it won't jump and instead it will continue where it left off. I will post some pictures of the site so far in another post.

The rest of the week and probably next week as well, I will be adding more commands to the site so that I can start testing remote control from work.