I got fed up with having to run through the build procedure for mspgcc with others. I think I must have done it four times now. So, I’ve packaged it into some RPMs that I’ve built for Fedora 9. I’m trying to get them into the Fedora repositories, but for now you can download them from here. These include the patches for the msp430f2xx, and the other patches that the mspgcc guys recommend.
I haven’t done GDB yet, but hope to over the next few days.
A message on the Student Robotics mailing list had cast some doubt as to whether it would be possible for teams to launch balls from a robot. Jeff and I strongly disagreed with this pure conjecture. Having been involved previously with building a ball launcher for a FIRST robot, we knew that it was possible (video here) with much larger balls than SR is going to be using.
But we felt that further conjecture about the situation wouldn’t have helped. Just after I’d digested what the mailing list post had said Jeff and I started hacking up a demonstration device from stuff that we’d got lying around the place.
We built a launcher from a battery-powered drill, a random wheel Jeff had lying around, a coach bolt, numerous wood screws and a few bits of wood. The most complex part involved was a turned insert for adapting the wheel’s hole to the coach bolt diameter. The result of this build was a little disappointing:
Can’t see the video? Click here
After considering the situation for a few minutes, we decided that this didn’t sufficiently demonstrate that balls could be launched. We could either increase the wheel diameter or increase the rotational speed. Since we didn’t have a bigger wheel available and Jeff had got a suitable motor from a printer, we changed the motor. This involved putting the wheel on bearings made from chopping board and coupling the motor to the shaft with plastic tubing:
We connected this motor up to my power supply. This motor had previously been pulled from a printer so we were unaware of its specs. Sticking 36V into it from my bench PSU worked pretty well. The performance with the faster motor was much improved:
Can’t see the video? Click here
We pointed it upwards to find out how far up it would go. Unfortunately, our measurement system became saturated:
Can’t see the video? Click here
We made a point of timing how long it took us to do this prototyping: 4 hours and 49 minutes. That’s two prototypes and dinner. Not bad, considering that we got a definite answer about whether one can build a ball launcher. There are a few more photos and videos on Flickr.
Once again, the value of actually getting one’s hands dirty and actually building something has been demonstrated.
P.S. I’m back from Iceland, but more on that later…
I got fairly distracted experimenting with an idea I had about the Student Robotics wiki logo:
Still very much a work in progress…
Justyn alerted me to the existence of this LinuxDevices article about the Beagle Board. This platform looks like a good candidate for the robot controller for Student Robotics 2010! If it stays at $150 that is.
I’d like to add to the options that Steve presents. Inkscape is an amazing free vector graphics editor, which as far as I am concerned is just as functional as Corel Draw. We can export our designs from Corel Draw into an SVG, and then we’ll be happy.
I just performed a preliminary test, and Corel Draw can indeed export our document into an SVG fine. I had the standard issue of getting a font installed on a Windows machine in labs, but other than that there were no problems.
[rob@zarniwoop ~]$ ssh button uptime 16:30:23 up 364 days, 23:33, 1 user, load average: 0.17, 0.07, 0.01 Killed by signal 1. [rob@zarniwoop ~]$
Phew! The last few weeks months have been jam-packed full of stuff. I’ve been up to my ears in various bits of coursework and Student Robotics. I haven’t ever really got around to blogging about Student Robotics before now (except for the hardware release, and even then I didn’t say much). So here’s my attempt at describing what it is and how it got there.
Steve, Howard and I started talking about Student Robotics in August 2006. We were students at Southampton University (Steve and I still are). It wasn’t called ‘Student Robotics’ then — it was ‘ECSSR’ (Electronics and Computer Science Society Robotics). We weren’t really sure what we were trying to do, but had a vague idea of what sort of things we wanted. Howard and I had been involved in FIRST competitions before (along with Jeff and Justyn), and so we had an idea of the sort of things that we wanted to do:
- Bring robotics to young people
- Do some robotics ourselves
- Make it cheap
- Make autonomous things (not remote controlled cars)
- Not be robot wars
As I said, Howard, Jeff, Justyn and I had all been to FIRST events before with Peter Symonds Sixth Form College. If you’re from the USA then it’s likely you’ll know what a FIRST event is like. If you’re from anywhere else, you’ve almost certainly never heard of it. FIRST is a robotics competition that’s mostly held in the USA. Teams of young people, mostly in the age range of 16-18, get six weeks to build a remote controlled robot that has to complete some sort of challenge. The challenge is usually something that has a big human involvement and is something that one could quite happily watch without getting too bored! The atmosphere at FIRST competitions is nuts. Everyone’s hyped up, everyone cheers everyone else on. Each team strives to have something unique that separates them from the rest — t-shirts, badges, vacuum-formed hats, cucumbers for fellow competitors, capes, necklaces, cheerleaders and a whole load of other things that are just too numerous and varied to list or remember.
So FIRST is great. However, it has its downsides. Last time I heard, the entrance fee for FIRST was $6000 per team. That’s a big barrier for teams of students. You’ve got to be really sure that you want to spend your time working on robotics to find that sort of money. I think most teams get theirs through sponsorship. Secondly, FIRST robots are remote controlled cars. Why not be entirely autonomous? We can have autonomy, after all, “Computing is cheap”TM. A robot that drives itself has got to be more interesting than one that is being driven by someone.
So, we started trying to get people together within the Uni who would be interested in helping us run a competition between local sixth form colleges. The competition would take place on campus in Easter 2008. This was all starting in October 2006. We knew that we needed a lot of time to prepare for this competition. We needed to get electronics together, program it, document it and most importantly make it all compatible with our local schools.
To be continued in episode 2…
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