The spring university semester is coming to an end, and the Infotronic course closed with a Sumo robot challenge. Great challenge, new technologies, innovative approaches and funny designs 🙂
Groot
ToF (Time-of-Flight, see “Tutorial: STMicroelectronics VL6180X Time-of-Flight LIDAR Sensor“) sensors are fun: they measure the time the light takes to travel to an object and back again. That way they can measure the distance to object with a millimeter accuracy. An ideal sensor for a battle robot: 🙂
Front Blade attached
The year is coming to an end, the Holiday season is approaching. In case you are looking for a nice present: I have completed my version of a sand clock: a clock writing the time into sand:
Sandclock
If you are interested to build your own version, I have documented the different steps with tips and tricks…
How to fascinate kids for technology? Show them that engineering is fun :-). At the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts we have created the ‘MINTomat’: a robotics system for STEM activities rewarding interaction with bubble gums:
MINTomat
Yes, pretty over engineered compared to a normal bubble gum automata, but that’s part of the fun :-).
One goal of this blog is to inspire engineers, in one way or another. And when I get reports back that things were useful, I like to share it :-).
So here is something what a team of young undergraduates (Przemyslaw Brudny, Marek Ulita, Maciej Olejnik) did for theirs Master Thesis work at the Politechnika Wroclawska, Poland: a very cool flying machine controlled by two Kinetis K66, having many sensors (on own designed boards) with a custom debug/programmer board similar to the tinyK20, developed with the NXP Kinetis Design Studio:
UAV (Source: Thesis of Przemyslaw Brudny)
So here I have 50 new NXP Kinetis K22 Robot boards (see “Zumo Robot with Magnetic Encoders“), and they all need to be programmed with the first firmware on the bench:
Programming Robot Boards
The challenge is: how to do this in a fast an efficient way, without the need for an IDE or even host PC machine?
We are using robots to teach advanced embedded system programming at the Lucerne University (see “Sumo Robot Competition“). Students can buy the kit, and we are running out of available hardware. Time to produce a new series of robots :-). It took us a while to get to the next revision of the Zumo Robot, but finally the first one has been produced and assembled, and I think it is looking good :-).
Intro_Zumo_Robot
The bad news: my ESC (see “Kinetis Drone: Graupner ESC S3055 Failure“) for my Kinetis drone is still not repaired :-(. Anyway, I have plenty of other things to make for my drone project. One is to work on the remote controller:
Test Setup
I won’t be able to attend the Maker Faire in Rome (16. – 18. Oct. 2015). But five of the Sumo bots students from the previous semesters have built and programmed will be there.
Sumo Robots
In “Kinetis Drone: Frame Construction with Graupner Race Copter Alpha 250 Q” I have assembled the frame for my Kinetis Drone. In this post I’m going to drive the ESC’s (Electronic Speed Controllers) with the Freescale FRDM-K22F board:
Graupner S3055 ESC (Source: Graupner)
The Infotronic (INTRO) Spring 2015 course finished at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts with a Sumo Robot competition with great and funny robots:
Set of Sumo Robots
Students worked hard implementing their robots for the coming Sumo battles. Amazing looking Sumo Robots are the result :-). Have a look yourself:
Fat Bastard
Happy Sumoing 🙂
Finally, winter with lots of snow arrived in Switzerland. Getting up at 5am this morning to free up my front yard from the 25 cm snow which came down overnight, so I can drive my wife to work. She does not like driving in snow conditions, but it is fun for me :-). But lots of snow, I thought I could use a little helper bot:
Snow Plowing Sumo Bot
11 teams with a total of 14 robots participated at the May 2014 Mini-Sumo robot competition this week at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Horw/Switzerland.
Sumo, ready to battle
