MANOI-in-a-box

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Team 229 is heading to a FIRST competition this week- and since I don’t have three tests on one day I can actually go to this one! WOOHOO!

The location of this competition is one of the most awesome ones… APPARENTLY iRobot scouts people there. Meaning, they’re hunting for smart brains to hire during the summer. :XD: Even though I don’t roll with military style robots (they aren’t supposed to be sociable), that’s pretty cool, to be honest.

I figured that it would be awesome to carry MANOI around and just having it wave its arms, with a Team 229 flag (see picture above). I think some High Schoolers may enjoy that.

Transporting MANOI for the past few years has been a hassle… so we finally found a good box with styrofoam stuff in it! The styrofoam is actually really nicely engineered, because it comes cut into rectangles, which means that you can easily customize it. This is how MANOI fits in its new box:

There is room for MANOI’s basic needs in there- the batteries and charger, ping pong balls, USB cables… etc.

The outside needs more stickers, but I have the classic FRAGILE one, and a “Made with LabVIEW” sticker — even though it’s not even relatively made with LV. Hahahaha! I’m thinking of printing out a picture of an Arduino and taping it on there.

The other day, a member of CUARC with a dremel cut a hole in this metal box for me… Can you guess what is on the inside?

IT’S A MINTYBOOST! YAY!

This will provide MANOI’s microcontroller with the power that it needs while cheering on Team 229

I haven’t programmed the motions yet for MANOI, but I can do that in the hotel tonight. I’m thinking that the legs will be stationary, and just have the arms move around. Also thinking of using the Wii nunchuck to control which sensors are being read or something. I will indeed post the code when I make it! =)

Posted in: Art, MANOI, Projects, Robot.

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.

Tech Tent!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, July 11th, 2009

If you are in up-state New York today, drop by the Potsdam festival to the Tech Tent!

MANOI will be there playing hockey, and there will be a FRC-like game called Puck Push!

Posted in: MANOI, Other, 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.

FIRST Finger Lakes Regional 2009

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, March 8th, 2009

On March 6th and 7th I was able to experience a FIRST Robotics Competition hands on for the first time! Our team, 229 Division by Zero, competed at the Finger Lakes Regional (FLR) competition in Rochester, NY at RIT.

It was interesting. Since I didn’t really know what to expect, I didn’t have many assigned responsibilities other than to figure out what I wanted to do. There are two main options of things you can do when you are a team mentor:
1) Scouting
2) Helping out in the pit

Scouting is recording all of the statistics of human players on different teams. You have to sit up in the stands with all of your fellow scouters, and record the data. I tried this once and had to bail, I find it hard enough to focus on one robot at a time, let alone count the flying moon rocks from a human player AND see if they go in or not.

Helping out in the pit is mainly what I did. If there was a nut that came loose but couldn’t be reached, I’d help fix it. Programming errors, electrical problems. That sort of stuff. When we got into the elimination round, I helped check to see what battery is most full, and bring it back to the playing field. I must say, I think we were the most well-equipped team with batteries!

It was a great competition! I enjoyed the elimination round very much. We made it to semi-finals, which is quite an achievement! We’re sponsored by the university’s SPEED program, and I’m pretty sure we don’t have any other sponsors. There are some teams out there who are sponsored by NASA!

My main concern though was that it didn’t really feel like a robotics competition, but more or less like a RC car competition. I expect a robotics competition to have AI, and to actually have robotics involved. For this competition, all the parts were machined precisely, and everything was planned out. It just did not feel like a competition of robots.

I was expecting more autonomous, which would make it feel more like a robotics competition. The fact that most of the excitement stemmed from the human players and not the “robots” also enervated me. No one really ‘cared’ about how well the robot was designed. In fact, during the gameplay, it wasn’t really the robots that scored most of the points, it was the human players. How ironic is that?

Maybe it was just a poor game this year. The whole smooth surfaces thing was somewhat cheesy, in my opinion.

I had one notable problem there. I didn’t bring safety glasses, so I always borrowed from the table set up at the entrance to the pits. However, there was one shift where it was not an ordinary person lending out the glasses.

This lady denied me safety glasses!

Yes, this is true! Denied safety glasses! Can there possibly anything more stupid than that? There was a box full with safety glasses! I totally felt like reaching over the table and strangling her, but I didn’t. Instead, I ‘explained’ to her that I always borrowed glasses from here. Eventually the conversation became so ridiculous that I just went in the pit with no safety glasses on. The end of this all was that I ended up borrowing glasses from someone on the team.

My first FIRST competition, and I’m denied safety glasses. Not the best impression… shame on them.

I also was not very enthused how FIRST mentioned the economy and lots of other political mumbo-jumbo in their opening ceremony, and… well, basically during the entire competition.

However, it was fun. It was different. I enjoyed it! Our next competition is in Annapolis, Maryland. Hopefully we will pull off a victory!

Posted in: Projects, School.