Category Archives: Robotics

Snapshot: Work in Progress

Over the summer, I’ve been working on restructuring much of the robot—both to reduce its physical size and to reduce its power requirements.

A short (and incomplete) list of changes:

  1. Switch from old laptop motherboard to an Artigo pico-itx computer
  2. Move the Kinect down—empirical data shows that it does not need to be placed very high to get useful readings
  3. Elevate the base (by using bigger wheels): I’ve had troubles getting over bumps due to low ground clearance
  4. Change microcontrollers from an ATMega328P to a ATMega2560
  5. Add an LCD for quick feedback on important things like battery voltage and motor speed

Source code is available for download—there’s a Git repository at tpmo.im/robot.git.

git clone git://tpmo.im/robot.git

Alternatively, browse the repository over the internet here

Pictures:

Replaced the computer and moved the kinect. It's a lot smaller now!

Read More Leave a Comment

August 15, 2011

Categories:

Robotics

Robot updates

So I finally got around to taking some pics of the robot (as it is now):

Read More Leave a Comment

May 10, 2011

Categories:

Robotics

Mapping FTDI to files with udev

In the course of making a to-be-revealed robot, I’ve encountered problems with various FTDI cables (and their attached peripherals) being automatically mounted in different locations, depending on the order in which they were inserted and initialized. For obvious reasons, this poses an issue – the IMU cable won’t work well with motor commands, and the actuator controller doesn’t give any IMU data.

After some thinking, I decided to solve the problem via udev mounting (somewhat hackish). In Linux, udev controls the mounting of various hardware peripherals to mountpoints in the file system. This tutorial is written for Ubuntu 10.10, but could easily be translated to any distribution of Linux (and probably Mac OS X, as well).

Read More Leave a Comment

April 13, 2011

Categories:

Robotics

Baltimore

We just got back from the Baltimore Regional for the FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition). Despite some early setbacks involving mechanical failures and untested hardware, our robot, the Hand of the Monkey, performed well – the fast minibot gained us most of our points, since the drivers didn’t get enough practice to really hang all that many game pieces.

We stayed at the Sheraton Hotel in the Inner Harbor, just a block away from the Baltimore Convention Center where the actual competition was held. Since we had to fly in, we didn’t have much in the ways of transportation – most of the time, we just walked to where we needed to go. Unfortunately, we never did get a chance to try Baltimore’s famous crab, so maybe next time.

In terms of the competition itself, we managed to make it into the quarter-finals, eventually losing to the first-seed alliance (this was mostly because our alliance had two useless robots (teams unnamed) and us), leaving us to score almost all of the points in the round. Although our position was uneviable, we felt we acquitted ourselves well.

As something of a surprise, we did get the Engineering Inspiration Award, the second most prestigious award given at a regional competition. With it, we qualify for the World Championships in St. Louis – an accomplishment that we didn’t really expect from our travel tournament.

Read More Leave a Comment

March 21, 2011

Categories:

Robotics

Tags:

, ,

A2PI Pictures

Some pictures (nothing more, atm).

Read More Leave a Comment

December 6, 2010

Categories:

Robotics

 
Content-Type: text/html