Australia Trip Day 1

I am on my way to Australia! After receiving ashes for Ash Wednesday, I quickly headed over to the Indianapolis International Airport. I will be heading out to Chicago, Los Angles, Sydney then Dubbo. This will be the last post for 36 hours. Next post will have some beautiful images from the land down under!

iRobot Create Arduino Shield

This project has kind of been a secret, but it seems to be nearing completion and I really want to share it. For Christmas my parents got me an iRobot Create. I am a huge fan of the Arduino and wanted to get a shield for it. I soon discovered that there were no good shields for the Create so I set about making my own. After several revisions (and some magic blue smoke) I finally have a working board. I have not populated all the features of the latest revision (Rev. C) yet, but I do have status LEDs and basic serial communication working. What does my shield do? This board provides power LEDs for all major power supplies coming from the Create, it also allows the Arduino to monitor the battery level. There are header’s for the Create’s built in I/O as well.

While the board is working correctly, it is not quite perfect. The big issue is that there is a ton of heat coming from the Arduino. This is from the voltage regulator. I am well within tolerance, but linear voltage regulators are known to put off a ton of heat. I plan to add some voltage regulation to the shield so it does not put so much strain on the built in Arduino regulator.

So now for the bad news (or good news depending on how you look at it). Tomorrow I leave to go to Australia. I am going to Rose-Hulman’s Oakley Southern Sky Observatory in New South Whales, Australia. That means I will not be working on this shield for a about a week (or other NXT projects). I will be blogging some of the images from my trip. Another hobby of mine is Astronomy. Last year I wrote some software to control our observatory. Think of it as a really big (super expensive) robot. In addition to doing some work at the Rose-Hulman Observatory, I will also be visiting Siding Springs Observatory, located just a few miles away.

DaNI + 5 DOF Arm = Win

I have made a few posts about my senior design project, but this one is by far the best. We have completed the main deliverable for the project. Check out the video below to see what we did. The robot has amazing accuracy.

Line Following Demo

I have gotten a ton of emails lately about how to follow a line with an NXT. I decided to build a bot to show off some of the easiest ways. Using twin light sensors and a LineLeader from Mindsensors, this robot shows 3 possible ways to complete that task. First, it can use a single light sensor and a simple threshold to follow the line. This method proves to be slow, but effective. Next it uses two light sensors to move forward and correct if one sees the black line. Finally comes the Mindsensors LineLeader which uses 8 light sensors and a control theory called PID to follow the line. As we add more light sensors and more complex control, the robot moves faster and more smoothly. Check out the bot and video below!

Brickbot

Baz, an MCP up in Montreal, Canada, created one of the coolest robots ever, Brickbot. Brickbot is a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot, hidden under a big LEGO shell. For Christmas/my birthday, my roommate got me a few LEGO containers. Like Marc, I quickly made a robot to fit inside the shell. Using parts from only one NXT kit (but some may be different in color), I created the frame you see here. I put in a ultrasonic sensor that looks under the bigger brick to help it avoid objects. I wrote a quick program in NXT-G and my red Brickbot was born. He roamed around at the Greenfield Brick Expo and will be roaming around today at the IL FLL State Tournament in Chicago. More pictures below!

Eating LEGO

I decided to do some work on the LEGO MINDSTORMS Space Shuttle. As some of you may know the orbiter’s mass alone is close to 5 kilograms. (Imperial units, that is about 11 pounds!) This puts a huge amount of stress on the gear boxes that drive the motion of both the Canada robotic arm and the rocking of the orbiter itself. Every 3 months or so, I have to take the shuttle apart and inspect or fix the gear boxes. The arm Baz built has been clicking lately, but I have discovered that is just a torque issue (too much in this case). I can fix that in software. The bigger issue is the gear boxes John built. They eat LEGO, literally. Check out the picture of the parts that I removed from the gear boxes. Those are half module bushings that have been eaten away.Yikes!

Also, special thanks to my brother, Anthony. He sent up his nice Nikon camera in preparation for my trip to Australia next month. It takes beautiful pictures!

Greenfield Brick Expo

This past weekend was the Greenfield Brick Expo in Greenfiled, Indiana. It was a great event with over 7,000 square feet of LEGO creations. I was out with several robots, including the LEGO MINDSTORMS Space Shuttle. The booth always had a crowd, but I was able to capture these before the beginning of the second day. Check out the pictures from my booth at the event. This next weekend I will be in Chicago at the Illinois State FLL Tournament! I will be bringing much of what you see here, plus a few more.  If you are in the area, stop by!

Do you see any new robots?! I will have a post later this week featuring some of my newer designs.

Happy New Year and DI dWifi Send VI

Happy New Year! 2012 is here and I have some new code to celebrate the holiday!

The Dexter Industries dWifi sensor has opened up a whole new world for LEGO MINDSTORMS. For those of you who have looked at the sensor, you will notice it requires that a “newline” character (decimal 13). The dWifi also likes each byte to be sent individually. To cope with these requirements, I have posted a block that does all the work for you. As you can see from the screen capture on the right, there is a simple loop to send each byte (including the newline byte added to your string). The file is posted and is live now on the Files page of my blog. You can use the regular Set Speed and Read VIs that come with the RS485 2.0 download.

Stay tuned for more dWifi LabVIEW and NXT-G updates!

Techn’xt Podcast

Joey over at Techn’xt posted a new video. This special video features an interview with me. Joey is a great friend and has an excellent blog. Check it out! I have reposted the video below.

 

Robot with Reach

My senior design project has made some great progress. Besides all the software we have written, we have now officially mechanically integrated our robotic arm with our NI DaNI base. There are still some minor issues to work out, but the majority of the work is done. In the new year, we will be working on creating a demo to show off the robot’s flexibility. We will be posting a video with the new, integrated system working after classes resume in January. Since we have a fair bit of time (about 2 months) remaining, we plan to go hog wild on this project. If its worth doing, it worth over-doing, right?