nemo1

Is it possible for Fusion Brain and iBus to communicate? I am planning to use Fusion Brain, Fusion Brain photo sensor and iBus to turn on the headlights when it becomes dark. From what I understand, Fusion Brain has capability to turn on headlights but would prefer iBus to make the wiring simpler.

Thanks

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2k1Toaster

Maybe possible if you write custom firmware, but as it stands now, iBus is not controllable from the FB.

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mx270a

How practical is this? Seriously, I've been toying with the idea of doing something similar, just to offload some processing power.

I'm currently running steering commands at 20Hz, but in theory it would allow me to increase processing speed to like 50Hz, without needing to send stuff down the USB bus that often, and without any processing delays when the computer gets busy. I'm only getting GPS corrections at 5 or 10Hz, so in theory, I wouldn't need to have communication between the FB and computer any faster than that.

I've looked at the arduino, but I much prefer the FBs outputs being full voltage switching that can power a relay. No need to add extra chips on to do stuff like that.

Is iBus something like CanBus? If so, maybe a CanBus to USB converter would work, but then you'd need to find a way to issue commands right to the bus, and of course you'd have to figure out what the commands are to issue.

greenman100

The V4s let you write your own firmware and load it over USB.

I don't think we'll let our firmware go open source, but email us and maybe we can work something out.

Also, our firmware's good up to 250Hz....

mx270a

That's certainly respectable. I'll look into it eventually.

The FB and computer talking at 250Hz is awesome, but I've already got the computer doing a crap ton of stuff every time it gets a new GPS location in. What I'm trying to get away from is any delay on the steering loop, even if only for 50ms. I have a yaw sensor that needs consistent readings to get a stable vehicle heading. I'm already running the FB control loop in another thread to be non-blocking, but with a single core CPU, there is always going to be some level of blocking. In a perfect world, I'd let the PIC deal with all the simple stuff like running the yaw rate through a kalman filter and issuing a steering command accordingly, then just send major steering updates as I get them from GPS. Doing what I'm doing now, I can visually see the IO delay to the FB when I do more strenuous processing. Fortunately, it's subtle enough that it doesn't bother anything.

Seems I've hijacked the thread.

greenman100

Interesting. I'd think a full CPU would be better suited for blasting away at mathematical stuff than a PIC, but you're welcome to try

greenman100

also is 20hz or 50mS really not enough? I'd think 1 second would be more than sufficient. you're not moving very fast...

mx270a

Yeah, I know it sounds odd. I think it would be easier to steer an airplane smoothly than tractor, simply because the airplane is moving faster. Any steering changes can be picked up on GPS. In a tractor, I'm moving so slowly that the GPS location can't accurately determine the heading of the machine. For that I need a yaw sensor to "feel" rotation, but the frequency needs to be relatively fast to get smooth vehicle control. It will work at slower frequencies, but, the vehicle control suffers a bit.

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