Taming The Beast

I’ve spent the better part of the last two hours trying to look for a way to make the robot slightly less homocidal.  I came up with someone else who needs to do the same thing I do, that is, rotate the motor 45 degrees exactly and not have it go all wobbly or insane. He’s got loads of graphs, but no solutions.  Apparently there’s another firmware which does really great, if you want to put a non-standard firmware on the NXT and risk bricking the brick.

Then there’s another guy who’s produced a 37 KB executable that’s suppose to do quick and precise rotation.  Never mind that it’s 37 KB worth of code for an embedded system with limited RAM.  Never mind that it’s tainted by the GPL (And the “You Suck Microsoft” GPLv3, at that).  If it does what I need, I’ll use it.

Except…  It doesn’t do what I need.  In fact, it appears to have absolutely no redeeming qualities about it.  The motor still waggles, pretty much the same amount as the normal command.  On top of that, it makes the brick beep.  WTF?  Why do I want the brick to beep when I’m moving a motor?  Then it’s got some questionable coding practices, including encoding command messages as ASCII characters which have to be parsed and interpreted, because obviously, you want to add all the overhead you can when you’re dealing with embedded systems and time-critical operations.  And it’s an executable, not a library, so if there’s anything else you want to do on the NXT side, you’re screwed.

So, I still don’t have happy movement.  I think I’m just going to tone down the motor power a bit and hope it behaves better.

I only have one day left to get it right.