Trippy's sensors

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Another super day in RSOH land. My wife thought it was a noremal RSOH day so she planned on going to a friend's house after Peter went to bed, so I invited Jeff over to try and get a peizo rate gyro and an analog Dinsmore compass working with Trippy.

He usually does the connector soldering while I try and figure out how to talk to the particular sensor using the motorobots library.
Six hours later....

We had the gyrocompass working. And it only took this much code:

void
setup_gyro() {
    PTAObjectP pta;
    ServoObjectP servo;

    /*
     * Configure TPU channel #3 to generate a 1 millisecond pulse
     * every 20 milliseconds or so. These are the default settings
     * for the servo routines.
     */
    servo = servo_init(3);
    servo_powered(servo,TRUE);

    /*
     * Configure TPU channel #2 to capture the time the input pin is
     * low, and call the routine catch_period(time) with that time.
     */
    pta = tpu_pta_init(2,MODE2,TCR1,1,&catch_period);
    tpu_pta_execute(pta);
}

void
catch_period(uint32 value) {
    /*
     * Print out the time that TPU pin #2 has been low
     */
    printf("%d\n",value);
}

Adding a rate gyro

A peizoelectric rate gyro from a model helicopter.	A Dinsmore analog compass with long wires.	Another shot of the gyro	A beautiful 1 millisecond pulse pretending to be a model helecopter reciever.
The captured pulse wisths from the rate gyro after I shook it around a bit.	Gyro and MRM with LCD panel removed.

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