Malika Meghjani


McGill University,
Center for Intelligent Machines,
3480, University Street,
McConnell Engineering building, Room 403,
Montreal, Quebec, Canada H3A 2A7
Phone: +1(514)-398-2186
malika_AT_cim_DOT_mcgill_DOT_ca

Malika Meghjani


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Teaching Assistant

Resources

  • BoeBots with Arduinos
  • While TA'ing for COMP 417 (Introduction to Robotics and Intelligent Systems) in Fall 2013, I upgraded the BoeBots to work with Arduinos. The BoeBots orginally come with a BASIC stamp which is coded using parallax's version of BASIC language. I used the power and ground connections of the BoeBots to power the Arduino and re-wired the motors, servo and sensor (SONAR, Buzzer) pins so that they could be controlled using the Arduino. Here are the instructions for re-wiring and writing some simple code using Arduino IDE: BoeBot with Arduinos.

  • BoeBots, Arduinos, XBees and ROS
  • For one of the final projects in COMP 417, I extended the BoeBot and Arduino setup to use an XBee module for communication with a laptop. This allowed the students to map an environment with the onboard SONAR on the BoeBot and remotely visualize it on their laptop. For the communications, I used a XBee on the laptop which was paired with the XBee on the BoeBot. The detailed instructions for pairing two XBees can be found at this link. For mapping, transmitting and visualizing the SONAR values I used rosserial and OpenCV libraries.

  • Eclipse and Windows
  • As a TA for COMP 322 (Introduction to C++), I got several requests for using Eclipse on Windows platform. So, I compiled the following instructions based on this video.

    Instructions:

  • Install gcc/MinGW - download here
  • Install Eclispe - download here
  • In Eclipse, choose path to gcc by following
    Window -> Preferences -> C/C++ -> Build -> Environment -> Add -> variable: PATH, Value: give the path to where you installed gcc
  • Download the assignment package. Unzip it. In Eclipse,
    File -> Import -> C/C++ -> Existing Code as Makefile Project,
    then Browse to the place where you unziped the package. Before you finish: uncheck "Show only available toolchains that support this platform" and select MinGW from the box. This will setup the toolchain.