Friday Night Robotics – Competitions all weekend long!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 5th, 2009

For FNR this week, there are many competitions going on! Thursday was Physics I Team Design Lab Challenge Sessions, Friday was a FTC Competition and Saturday is a FLL Competition! After Saturday is the competition that is the most worthless but “necessary” … final exam(s). -_-

Friday, the FTC competition was amazing! FTC is FIRST Tech Challenge, and it’s where middle school and high school students build robots out of metal and some lego parts. The brain of the robot is an NXT, and they can program it in either RobotC, NXT-G, or LabView with the NXT toolbox.

The field is 12 feet by 12 feet, and this year’s challenge is called HotShot! The robots have to score wiffleballs into the zone in the middle, the nets above the zone, or the containers off to the side of the field. The wiffleballs are released onto the field when a holster tube is pushed. Yellow wiffleballs are better than white wiffleballs.

There’s a 30 second autonomous mode at the beginning of the game, followed by a teleoperated mode. The robots are controlled by a logitech controller that has joysticks and buttons (hahaha, what a lame description), which goes into software called the Field Controller Station. This software is on the laptop that the team supplies. The software then communicates via Bluetooth to the robot.

On the technical side of things, the Bluetooth works great if you have one robot. If you have 40 robots connected with Bluetooth, the air gets too cluttered. We ran into some problems the other day when robots started moving on their own and some teams would be disconnected if they switched from autonomous mode to teleoperated mode.

Problems or not, it was fun. Apparently it ran more smoothly than it did last year, so that was fantastic! Plus, one of the teams that I was helping gave me one of their team t-shirts! The music was great, and the event was streamed live from WCKN onto the internet!

There are 79 pictures that were taken live at the event up on team229robotics.com.

The FLL competition is today, Saturday December 5th. You can tune in to the live stream right here and subscribe to team229robotics.com’s RSS feed to have updated live blogging images as they come in!

Posted in: Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

Robotics Floor = Closest thing to paradise!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

A while ago, I was on the internet TV show – Fat Man and Circuit Girl! At that time, when I showed the robotics floor, we only had a camera and a desk. Now we have everything on the floor, and it’s virtually the closest thing to a paradise!

The robotics floor is basically a group of people that all really enjoy robotics- we’re all on the FIRST 229 team. We help out with 229 related activities, like remote mentoring. Basically any team that is in our county can call in and ask for help on their robot. I really like the feel of remote mentoring, it’s like being on-call for a robo-emergency. There hasn’t been any calls yet, though The fancy name for the floor is ‘Living Learning Community’… or LL Community. We would say LLC, but I was the nerd who pointed out we could easily be pwned for that, especially if someone had a company called Robotics LLC or Team 229 LLC. Plus, it’s just generally confusing if people look on the website and see a LLC, it wouldn’t make sense- so it’s LL Community. =)

This is the phone we use for remote mentoring. We’re going to be switching to VoIP soon, though:

We have a huge computer that has two displays, an extreme amount of graphical processing power, can record TV shows and has a Netflix account. It’s an amazing computer. The keyboard and mouse are really nice, too.

On top of this, we have a huge smart board! It’s really amazing! It stands up and has a projector sort of floating in front of it. You can touch the screen and it’s like your clicking!!! I tried some of the Processing applications that I made, and it works really good, and the particle finger painting looks extremely realistic!

We also have this intense camera! You can move it around from the internet, and it can zoom in super far, it’s creepy!!!

This is what it looked like with people in it, when it was in its most fire hazardous messy lego state:

It’s much cleaner now, though.

So yeah, that’s the Robotics Floor. I haven’t heard about this type of awesomeness at any other university, so Clarkson has done this first! Woohoo!

So, this floor is so super amazing, but what’s the worst part of it? I’d have to say the respect that the people on the floor have. There’s so little of it that it’s somewhat disgustingly sad

The main problem I have is Quiet Hours. For some reason, everyone on the floor doesn’t understand what QUIET means. So this means that I have to do the RA’s job and tell everyone to shut up, EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I’ve tried being nice, angry, mean, aggressive, sad, happy, ignoring it, and telling the RA to shut everyone up, but nothing works! They don’t have the courtesy to respect anyone that likes to wake up at the beginning of the morning. How can such an amazing floor have that little respect for its floormates? It disappoints me and bedaffles me!

If I didn’t have respect though… I would play classical music super duper loud on my stereo, each morning, at 6AM. >:D But I haven’t done it yet, because I have respect. I respect people that don’t respect me… that doesn’t make sense. :S

Anyway, during the day this floor is the most amazing place on Earth!! This is what I see out of my window:

I hope that the bad part of the floor will improve, but it’s still the most amazing thing ever.

Posted in: Art, Projects, Robot, School.

Cool Gear from Honours Program

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, July 13th, 2009

In Clarkson’s Honours Program, for summer research you get $300 for anything related to your research.

In the hobby robotics world, $300 can do a lot of damage!

I just wanted to mention here some of the super cool gear I have gotten from the Honours Program this summer, and how I plan to use it:

Purchase #1 (Sparkfun.com)

• Arduino MEGA ($64.95)
• 2 XBee 1mW Chip Antenna ($45.90)
• 2 XBee Explorer Regulated Boards ($19.90)

Total: $134.65
Remaining: $165.35

So the Purchase #1 was from Sparkfun, and it came in a nice-sized box. I love the Sparkfun boxes because of their colour and ruggedness. It’s like a super cardboard box!

The Arduino MEGA was just something that was needed. Originally, I intended for it to be used with the computer, attached to Processing, but it is being used for the control of MANOI’s servos. I remember I blogged about why I changed, it was a combination of the space, the fact that it fit in the box, and the way the headers are. It is even more better with the new soap boxes!

Two XBees and adapter boards, well that one is hard to figure out (lol). They are going to be used to transmit data from the computer (Processing) to the Arduino MEGA. I really like these boards because of their red colour and surface-mount LEDs, but the fact that it doesn’t work witht he FTDI cable sort of makes me want to use adafruit’s boards. However, I can use adafruit’s boards to program the XBee and use the sparkfun boards for the actual stuff.

Purchase #2A (Pololu.com)

• 0.100″ Breakaway Male Header ($0.99)
• 0.100″ Breakaway Double-sided Male Header ($1.49)
• Power HD Sub-Micro Servo ($9.95)

Total: $17.38
Remaining: $147.97

The normal male headers are needed for just about anything, especially when you are making the proto-boards (which I plan to do for the RGB LEDs). However, the double-sided headers are quite different. These I can use in jumpers to instantly make them male jumpers. It’s much cheaper to do this rather than just buying male headers!

I was supposed to get two servos, but there was a communication malfunction so I only got one. The servos are going to be for ears on MANOI. Ears are a simple, yet effective, way to make a robot show emotions & actions. I don’t really know where this stems from originally, but it feels like Mickey Mouse cartoons really make this evident as he has big ears, bigger than his own head!

Purchase #2B (Sparkfun.com)

• 2 Breakaway female headers ($3.00)
• Gyro Breakout Board – MLX90609 – 300 degree/sec ($59.95)

Total: $69.17
Remaining: $78.00

This has not arrived yet… but I am so PSYCHED to get my hands on a GYRO! Gyro sensors measure rotation. So, I could put this on MANOI and attach/make an interrupt loop so that if it senses that it is falling, it will try to not fall OR maybe I could get it so that a capacitor holds reset low for 5 seconds so the MEGA & SSC-32 would not be on when MANOI falls and bounces. THIS IS SO AWESOME!! I’M GETTING A GYRO!! WOOT! I know you are all jealous!

The two breakaway female headers are also useful to have when proto-ing boards.

So I still have $78.00 left to spend. I still have to buy that second servo, and while I’m at Pololu.com I’ll probably also buy some servo extension cables.

If I have enough money left, I’ll probably buy a second gyro so that I could mount both of them on MANOI’s knees to tell if one leg is falling faster than another.

This is so exciting!!

UPDATE: Purchase #3 was just made

Purchase #3 (Pololu.com)

• Power HD Sub-Micro Servo ($9.95)
• 5 x #780 Servo Extension Cable 12″ Female-Female ($14.95)
• 5 x #785 Servo Extension Cable 24″ Female-Female ($18.75)

Total: $59.60
Remaining: $18.40

Purchase #3 will get me my 2nd servo that I need for the ears, and will give me some servo extension cables that I need for the lights. I wish the servo extension cables cost less, but what can you do.

Posted in: Projects, Robot, School.

FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009 – Photos

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, March 9th, 2009

As per my previous post, there was most definitely more than just words to this entire competition!

It was in Rochester, New York at RIT. The fieldhouse was quite large, which provided a big enough dancefloor for the HS students.

I feel that the playing field for the robots wasn’t big enough. The robots should be smaller. THere wasn’t enough room for them to move or do anything!

This was our robot. I didn’t really help in designing it, but I helped in getting it set up and making some tweaks.

The games were pretty intense, sometimes. We got disqualified from one match because a zip tie was sticking out, and another match we got “static” from crashing into the boards. We made it to semi-finals! Here’s a picture of our alliance drive teams.

And… a picture of the entire team! Woohoo

Just the mentors (I’m on the right)

That was a pretty fun weekend!

Posted in: Projects, School.