RITA

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• Type: Handheld remote (RIFT in your hand)

RITA is a 3.5" touch screen that shows the DREAM Robotics fleet and talks to it through RIFT: every robot online, what each one says about itself, and a button for everything it can do.

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STAY CLOSE: RITA sends the fleet's ESP-NOW beacon once she's on a fleet network, so robots can tell how near she is. Her STAY button on NORA's and WHIP's pages makes them keep near her, about a metre away. Tested in simulation only so far.

Colours: colour_scheme.xml comes from her avatar: navy, cream, burnt orange and CRT teal, on her site and her screen.

Related Projects

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Overview

What she does

• Splash: her TV-head avatar for 5 s at power-up.
• Home: every robot she drives, its round avatar with its name under it: WHIP, NORA, MILA, NIKA, KIDA-00, KIDA-01, IDA, ARM and ARIA. The ones on the network have a green ring; the rest are dimmed.
• A controller for each robot: tap one and drive it, talking to the robot directly (its own web API, the one its PC controller uses). Hold a pad button to drive, let go and it stops. Each robot gets its own pad and buttons:
  • WHIP (hexapod): W / A / S / D with curves, crab left / right, HELLO, DANCE, REST, AUTO, CRAB - / + (his crab offset, a degree a press).
  • ARIA (drone): her state, battery and network, and the fleet's phrases. No flying: she flies from her app or a gamepad.
  • NORA (mecanum): A / D slide, diagonals slide, TURN L / R, AUTO, UV, music, her wheel lock.
  • MILA, NIKA, KIDA-00, KIDA-01 (tracks): WASD or TANK, switched at the top. The controls change, and so does the robot's own drive mode. The screen takes one finger at a time, so in TANK the tracks latch: tap the left track's FWD / STOP / BACK, then the right's, and each keeps going until you change it. LINK moves both together; the big STOP stops both.
  • IDA (no WiFi): through NORA's IR link.
  • ARM (no WiFi): driven from her PC over USB, so RITA just says so.
• RIFT too: from a controller, RIFT: ASK / DO shows what the robot says about itself through RIFT and everything RIFT can do with it, as 1 s timed moves that ask "Let RITA move NORA?" first.
• Safety stays with the robots: their own stops (walls, tilt, the wheel locks) still hold. Their PIN (ROBOT_PIN in secrets.h) signs RITA in as a controller; unlocking wheels is its own button (UNLOCK).
• The fleet's WiFi ladder: she joins the highest network she can see (RIFT, DREAM, NINA, TINA, the controllers, NORA), looks again every minute, and starts over when hers goes quiet. She registers with the hub as RITA (type remote).
• LED: green on RIFT's network, amber on another one (the list works, ask and do need RIFT), red with no network.

Later

• Host the fleet herself when there's no RIFT (a place on the WiFi ladder).
• RIFT's music together, the mission log and the robots' conversations.
• Start a robot's MIND mode from her (through its PC controller).

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Prerequisites

Part	Notes
ESP32-3248S035R	The 3.5" "Cheap Yellow Display": ESP32, 480x320 ST7796 screen, XPT2046 resistive touch, RGB LED, SD slot, speaker connector
USB cable	Power and flashing (micro-USB or USB-C, depending on the board revision)

• Arduino IDE (or arduino-cli) with the esp32 board package (3.x)
• Libraries: LovyanGFX, ArduinoJson (7.x)

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Pinouts

Part	Pins
ST7796 screen (HSPI)	SCLK 14, MOSI 13, MISO 12, DC 2, CS 15, backlight 27
XPT2046 touch (same bus)	CS 33, IRQ 36
RGB LED (active low)	R 4, G 16, B 17

Negative colours? Flip PANEL_INVERT in scripts/esp32/display.h. Red and blue swapped? PANEL_BGR.

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How to Run

1. Copy scripts/esp32/secrets.example.h to secrets.h and put in the fleet's WiFi passwords (the same as every robot's).
2. Flash her: flash.bat (on a fresh PC it installs the Arduino command line tool, the ESP32 board package and her libraries by itself, then finds the port, compiles and flashes, talking you through it), or open scripts/esp32/esp32.ino in the Arduino IDE with ESP32 Dev Module and the Huge APP partition scheme.
3. On the first boot, tap each corner as it lights up (touch calibration, kept in flash). Hold the screen while she starts to calibrate again.
4. She finds the fleet's network by herself. Tap a robot to see it and drive it.

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On the PC

preview.bat (or preview.sh) runs her real esp32.ino on the PC, drawn by the real LovyanGFX, with a pretend WiFi and a pretend fleet behind it. The window is her screen, the mouse is your finger and the console prints every web call she makes. preview.bat --shots writes these pictures to images/screens, and fails if holding a pad button doesn't drive, letting go doesn't stop, or a robot has more buttons than DRIVE shows.

It needs g++ and SDL2 (Windows: MSYS2's mingw64), Pillow for the pictures, and the libraries flash.bat installs.

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The DREAM Robotics ecosystem

Minds — DREAM companion · TINA engineer · NINA caretaker · RIFT fleet hub · LYCEA training school
Robots — NORA · MILA · WHIP · KIDA-00 · KIDA-01 · IDA · ARM · NIKA · ARIA
Remotes — RITA handheld remote