Building a PiCy

1. Can you ping the Raspberry Pi from the laptop, try:
   ping -t 192.168.0.201 from a command prompt,
   replacing the IP address 192.168.0.201 with the one from your Raspberry Pi.
   Does the ping work, or does it come back with an error?
2. Does the Raspberry Pi reset / lose connection when commanding the PiCy, try:
   ping -t 192.168.0.201 from a command prompt,
   replacing the IP address 192.168.0.201 with the one from your Raspberry Pi.
   With the ping still running load RemoteKeyBorgC.py and try to move, does the ping get interrupted?
3. Finally try setting the IP address in RemoteKeyBorgC.py
   line 10 should have broadcastIP, change the value to your Raspberry Pi's actual IP, e.g.
   

   broadcastIP = '192.168.0.201'           # IP address to send to, 255 in one or more positions is a broadcast / wild-card

   
   if the Raspberry Pi has an IP address of 192.168.0.201

• Is your left motor connected to M1+ and M1- ?
• Is your right motor connected to M4+ and M4- ?
• It could be a wiring problem, could you upload an image of the layout and / or photos of the connections.

Do I use the IP and port I connect to my Raspberry Pi via SSH?

By the way, my wiring is working whenever I use your script "stepper.py". I type a combination of 5,6 & 7 to make it go straight, left and right. But your "RemoteKeyBorgC.py" is not working for me. I might be doing something wrong though, I'm running "RemoteKeyBorgC.py" on SSH and trying to use the arrow keys. :)

RemoteKeyBorg comes in two halves, a server and a client.

The server, RemoteKeyBorgS.py, must be running on the Raspberry Pi using sudo, this will run inside an SSH terminal, remember to press ENTER when you see the message You can now turn on the power, press ENTER to continue before trying to control PiCy.
The server should be left running until you are finished using PiCy.

The client, RemoteKeyBorgC.py, tries to open a window to catch key presses, therefore it has to be run in a graphical environment.
The value for broadcastIP is best set to the IP address you are using for logging in via SSH.
If you are getting the error pygame.error: Unable to open a console terminal this means it cannot render a graphical display, so it will not work.
There are three ways around this problem:

1. Run RemoteKeyBorgC.py locally, it should run fine under Windows as well as Linux, but you may need to install Python and pygame first.
2. Use a graphical login to the Raspberry Pi, such as VNC or RDP, this will provide a graphical environment to log in to
3. Enable X11 forwarding for SSH, this may be effort but will allow you to use SSH as intended.

To setup VNC and RDP

wget -O vncserver http://piborg.org/sites/default/files/forum_upload/piborg/vncserver.txt
sudo apt-get -y install tightvncserver
sudo cp vncserver /etc/init.d/vncserver
sudo chmod a+x /etc/init.d/vncserver
sudo update-rc.d vncserver defaults
su pi -c /usr/bin/vncserver
sudo chown pi:pi /home/pi/.Xauthority
sudo apt-get -y install xrdp

When you are asked for a password enter a login password to use for VNC logins, we recommend the same password you use to login with SSH.
When you are asked if you want to enyet a view-only password, we recommend you reply no (n).
To connect to the Raspberry Pi graphically you can use Remote Desktop Connection on windows, or you can use a VNC program such as TightVNC.

To use X11 forwarding over SSH
You will need an X11 server program on the machine you are SSHing from.
If you are using Linux this will mostly likely be setup already.
If you are using Windows you will need to install an X11 server, we would recommend using Xming.
You will also need to enable X11 forwarding on the SSH program used, see the attached image if using PuTTY.