How To Control An Arduino Manipulator Robot with Delphi And Visuino

If you are into robotics, then this session is definitely a great fit for you. While robots are considered to be autonomous machines that can perform certain tasks based on the inputs taken by sensors, they are merely mechanical pieces until they are properly programmed using a powerful piece of ide software. This makes coding an integral part of their system. Interestingly, this session from the recently concluded DelphiCon, will show you how you can control visual programs in an Arduino Manipulator robot from a Delphi Application over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

How can I program a Robot and control it from Delphi?

The robot can be programmed both with Arduino IDE or with Visuino, the graphical development environment for Arduino, and is also by far the easiest way to program the robot. We can communicate with the robot from the Delphi application in multiple ways. The simplest way is using a serial port over USB. Alternatively, we can also use Bluetooth if we have Bluetooth Module on the shield. If we installed a Wi-Fi shield, we can also use Wi-Fi to communicate with the robot. Finally, we can replace the Arduino controller board with a different controller that has built-in Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.

When working on a robot project, programmers are more likely to encounter a variety of challenges along the way. There are often shields using the same pins that can cause conflicts. Some shields are simply not compatible with each other and you just have to look for alternatives. There are also some electrical problems such as power noise causing the boards to reset as well as other challenges like mechanical problems, wrong communication, and wrong Delphi project settings. 

How can we create an animated timeline and communicate with a robot?

In this session, we will also learn how to use an animation timeline to control the robot. The timeline has channels controlling the service and it needs to have the right values to position the servos properly. The simplest way to achieve that is to manually position the robot controlling the servos with the potentiometers which will be demonstrated by Boian Mitov in this video. He will also demonstrate how to write a simple visual application for the robot and a small Delphi application to display and record the values.

The video will also show us different ways to communicate with the robot over a Serial Port (Delphi), over Wi-Fi, and over Bluetooth. Feel free to watch the video below to learn more.