EVAs

Last night, Student Robotics was awarded an Excellence in Volunteering Award (EVA) for Best Student-Led Project.

"The EVAs are a celebration and acknowledgement of volunteering in SUSU. From dropping the beats live on air, to digging flower beds and running societies, SUSU has a diverse and inspirational volunteering movement." source

The award ceremony was held at Southampton Guildhall and featured performances from a range of societies including Comedy Club, Jazz Dance, Showstoppers and Ballroom & Latin Dance Society.

Well done to everyone who has helped out in the society over the years and made it into on of the best!

Student Robotics Competition 2009

After a year of hard work and preparation the second ever Student Robotics competition happened last Sunday at Southampton University. A film of the event has already been edited and does a far better job of describing the event than I can. This will appear on the srobo.org site as soon as I encode it into something which isn't half a gigabyte. Instead I want to dedicate this blog post to look forward to the next competition.

Meeting

The first meeting after the competition is usually the most fun as everyone, regardless of their technical involvement has ideas and suggestions of how we can make SR better. Yesterday's meeting was no exception and at least 3 whiteboards of ideas were generated. The criticism which has captivated my imagination is that the was a distinct lack of competitive spirit on the day. This manifested itself as:

• Limited interaction between teams
• General calmness on the day, no frantic hacking or code writing
• Poor team images - some teams didn't have names or proper flag

Whilst the more technical failures of the day can be solved with a palette of probes and debugging equipment, this problem requires a different approach. It was reassuring to hear everyone's wide-ranging ideas for how to make this better but it is clearly a difficult question to answer.

Ideas

Here are some of my favourite suggestions from yesterday's meeting:

• Online blogs for every teams - Students are encouraged to take loads of photos and blog about their progress. There is an award (publicised from the start) for the best online presence and we try to push this as being almost as coveted as first prize (like First)
• Robot Showcase - At the start of the competition, each team exhibits their robot in the arena to intimidate other teams and encourage competitism.
• SR Points - Teams can score points before the competition day by achieving certain milestones. This could be for being the first to post X blog posts or the first to demonstrate a working ball launcher or for helping another team solve their technical problem. Points could also be awarded for posting helpful responses in forums
• Kickstart reminders - When we have the `year in an hour' build session at Kickstart, we take photos of progress after each `month' and then during the year when students log in they are first presented with a picture of their progress for the equivalent month. For most teams this will be an incentive to work harder!

Fostering a strong online community is clearly a difficult task, you need only look at the comments on youtube for evidence of this - however we are in a good position to do so, since we have a large group of sixth form students with a common interest in robotics and hopefully a desire to win.

PWM & JIO Boards V2

It has taken me approximately three days of soldering, de-soldering, and then flashing to get through all of the mods on the JointIO and PWM Boards but now they are all done. This means they will be shipped from Monday of this week onwards. Which leaves the teams with just about enough time to program their robots.

Here is a photo of the individual boards:

JointIO Board


PWM Board


Jointio & PWM Boards

Servo Board V2 Firmware

I have spent today fighting gdb and gdb-proxy in an attempt to update the firmware for the PWM board (Servo board). I spent the first two hours going 'aargh' because msp430-gdb kept issuing me with missing data stack errors and empty symbol tables. Eventually from looking at last years code i was able to view work out what was wrong. Weirdly, adding a static variable into my code (which was only assigned to once) was enough to solve my problem, however this makes no sense why.

The reason the firmware needed upgrading is because we have put a beefier MSP micro-controller on the board, subsequently the board layout has changed. Once I got my head around both the motor controllers i2c routines and the old pwm firmware i began merging bits of code together. After a suitable amount of time, anger, coffee, realisation of how stupid i was being and more coffee, I managed to get the new board to seep all the servo pins back and forth, demonstrating that this part of the board works.

Enjoy the video - I did!




Some Photos:


The new servo board. The two LEDs indicate both power supplies are connected. The third LED which isn't illuminated, should be, however due to some primate-like soldering skills, there appears to be a short.


The servos in motion.


The MSP430 programmer. I mounted it on an old credit card to make the wiring a little more secure. Despite it looking horrible, it actually works surprisingly well. Honest.

Tools, please?

Yesterday was the first 'big build' session of the new academic year. The goal was to build three new robot chassis from scratch and renovate two existing bots ready for Wednesday's new recruits event. The designs were uniform, a simple two tiered structure supported at the corners by threaded aluminium bar. The top 'shelf' houses the electronics whilst the base seats the motors and heavy Pb battery.

Plenty of man-power ensured the MDF was whittled into shape before long however the 'design-whilst-building' approach almost derailed proceedings. The main, and predicted, stumbling block was connecting the motors to the wheels and supporting the drive shaft. Thankfully Jeff lathed some beautiful, affectionately named 'bastards' which did the first job nicely.

Despite lugging an unhealthy amount of mech kit/supplies from Tizard to my house, there was still a massive shortage of tools. One drill between 9 people was pain. No callipers, g-clamps, large drill bits, work bench, metal rules, sharp hacksaw or metal-cutting equipment was again, more pain.

Nevertheless, something resembling five robots are congregated in my bedroom as i blog, two of which are in a fit state for Wednesday. The other three are not quite there but tomorrow afternoon should see to that.

(pictures to follow)

Fire

Long time no post. That's because I'm on fire. Kickstart was manic and we've made yet more rods for our backs by holding a 'new recruits' event next Wednesday. We thought it would be a great idea to have 5 working basic robots (chassis, motor, electronic kit) for people to actually have some fun and experience what the competitors will have to do. This of course means we have to buy more electro-mech kit and then build some new chassis. Not to mention get together enough electronics kit, program it with the latest firmware, and finish off the IDE all in time for next week.

Last night was a mamoth online ordering session requiring setting up accounts with no less than 3 suppliers, and trawling through product pages to make sure we'd have everything we need. I just hope they all live up to their 'next day dispatch' promise.

Kickstart 2008 arena layout

Thursday PM Cube Layout: