04-07-2020, 06:21 PM
Hi Brian, hi everyone,
I just wanted to follow the invitation and say: „Hello!”
My name is Robert Grosch. Reading other portraits here on the forum, I feel a bit intimidated, because I neither have a strong background in coding nor with SBCs – I am even rather a novice to the Raspberry Pi. But maybe this is not so much a problem and I can help making the subject of game programming on the Raspberry Pi more accessible by giving this group a voice …
I have a background in Engineering, Dynamic Simulation, and Process Control. I self-taught myself Turbo Pascal in my youth and had a C/C++ course during my studies, but not much kept sticking of the latter. Later during my time at university I did some developing of numerical computational routines in MathLab and only used C to write wrappers which allowed me to hook up numerical Fortran code like the classic DDASSL to MATLAB to simulate my models. Since a few years I teach Process Automation at a vocational college which involves some basic programming of Siemens (in the past) and Phoenix Contact Controllers (more recently)... At my school we usually build ourselves the demo process plants which are then automated by the students during the course work. (The demo plants are really mostly build and extended by graduating student during their final projects.) There is a tradition at my school to only use industry standard components, which the students will encounter at their working environment. However, with the rise of IoT and Industry 4.0, I started thinking about braking with this tradition, because some things are just so much easier, quicker, and cheaper to develop and demonstrate with Arduino type controllers or Raspberry Pi type SBCs.* Triggered by my fascination with these, I recently started taking a closer look at them in my spare time. I doubt that we will ever be able to squeeze programming an Arduino or a Pi into the already crowded syllabus, but these could be used in some of our demo applications. Also programming games on a Pi or developing robots based on Arduino boards could be fun topics of voluntary courses or extra-curricular clubs.
For now though, I am here purely a hobbyist and was drawn to this site and the book through the articles in The MagPi Magazine - the final article of the 12 paper series in the German print issue to be specific - which I had bought just for fun! However, coding my own game was something I always wanted to do and I also always planned to deepen my C/C++ skills. Doing this on a Raspberry Pi just seemed to add so much to the fun!
Also, I very much liked the writing and teaching style in the article, so I finally got the book. I will be moving houses soon, so I will only have time to work seriously with the material in a month time (hopefully).
By now, I actually PDF-printed all articles of Brian’s 12 series tutorial from the free English version of the MagPi and would be happy to share these here. Others might enjoy them as much as I do and they might also decrease the entry hurdle to this topic for others…
Thanks again to everyone for the warm welcome and I am looking forward to working through the articles and the book & sharing successes and failures here in the forum!
Cheers, Robert
* For example, we spent weeks and still could not get an RFID sensor to work with our type of Phoenix Contact Controller. The Controller types we have installed are a bit older models and Phoenix Contact does not have their own RFID sensors. So we ordered an IO-Link (supposedly new plug & play industry standard) RFID Sensor from Contrinex and connected that to a Phoenix Contact Modbus IO-Link Master. The later we were told interfaces with the sensor via IO-Link, while it communicates with the controller via ModBus protocol over the internal LAN. All in all we talk about equipment costing around 1000 €. But even after hours and hours we did not get it to work and could finally demonstrate that the IO-Link implementation in the IO-Link master was not complete. Supposedly this is now fixed in the new version of their IO-Link master, but there is neither a fix nor a firmware update for our device.
The crazy thing is, that using an Arduino Uno clone I was able to do read / write from/ to an RFID tag just after 2 hours… that being an absolute novice to Arduino with a cost of the hardware of less than 20 €…
I just wanted to follow the invitation and say: „Hello!”
My name is Robert Grosch. Reading other portraits here on the forum, I feel a bit intimidated, because I neither have a strong background in coding nor with SBCs – I am even rather a novice to the Raspberry Pi. But maybe this is not so much a problem and I can help making the subject of game programming on the Raspberry Pi more accessible by giving this group a voice …
I have a background in Engineering, Dynamic Simulation, and Process Control. I self-taught myself Turbo Pascal in my youth and had a C/C++ course during my studies, but not much kept sticking of the latter. Later during my time at university I did some developing of numerical computational routines in MathLab and only used C to write wrappers which allowed me to hook up numerical Fortran code like the classic DDASSL to MATLAB to simulate my models. Since a few years I teach Process Automation at a vocational college which involves some basic programming of Siemens (in the past) and Phoenix Contact Controllers (more recently)... At my school we usually build ourselves the demo process plants which are then automated by the students during the course work. (The demo plants are really mostly build and extended by graduating student during their final projects.) There is a tradition at my school to only use industry standard components, which the students will encounter at their working environment. However, with the rise of IoT and Industry 4.0, I started thinking about braking with this tradition, because some things are just so much easier, quicker, and cheaper to develop and demonstrate with Arduino type controllers or Raspberry Pi type SBCs.* Triggered by my fascination with these, I recently started taking a closer look at them in my spare time. I doubt that we will ever be able to squeeze programming an Arduino or a Pi into the already crowded syllabus, but these could be used in some of our demo applications. Also programming games on a Pi or developing robots based on Arduino boards could be fun topics of voluntary courses or extra-curricular clubs.
For now though, I am here purely a hobbyist and was drawn to this site and the book through the articles in The MagPi Magazine - the final article of the 12 paper series in the German print issue to be specific - which I had bought just for fun! However, coding my own game was something I always wanted to do and I also always planned to deepen my C/C++ skills. Doing this on a Raspberry Pi just seemed to add so much to the fun!
Also, I very much liked the writing and teaching style in the article, so I finally got the book. I will be moving houses soon, so I will only have time to work seriously with the material in a month time (hopefully).By now, I actually PDF-printed all articles of Brian’s 12 series tutorial from the free English version of the MagPi and would be happy to share these here. Others might enjoy them as much as I do and they might also decrease the entry hurdle to this topic for others…
Thanks again to everyone for the warm welcome and I am looking forward to working through the articles and the book & sharing successes and failures here in the forum!
Cheers, Robert
* For example, we spent weeks and still could not get an RFID sensor to work with our type of Phoenix Contact Controller. The Controller types we have installed are a bit older models and Phoenix Contact does not have their own RFID sensors. So we ordered an IO-Link (supposedly new plug & play industry standard) RFID Sensor from Contrinex and connected that to a Phoenix Contact Modbus IO-Link Master. The later we were told interfaces with the sensor via IO-Link, while it communicates with the controller via ModBus protocol over the internal LAN. All in all we talk about equipment costing around 1000 €. But even after hours and hours we did not get it to work and could finally demonstrate that the IO-Link implementation in the IO-Link master was not complete. Supposedly this is now fixed in the new version of their IO-Link master, but there is neither a fix nor a firmware update for our device.
The crazy thing is, that using an Arduino Uno clone I was able to do read / write from/ to an RFID tag just after 2 hours… that being an absolute novice to Arduino with a cost of the hardware of less than 20 €…