Robot Goes To Summer Camp

November 26, 2023 by 3 Comments

There are a lot of hobby and educational robots that have a similar form factor: a low, wide body with either wheels or tracks for locomotion. When [Alexander Kirilov] wanted to teach a summer robot camp, he looked at several different commercial offerings and found all of them somewhat lacking. His wish list was a neat-looking compact robot that was easy to extend, had various sensors, and would work with Python. Finding nothing to his liking, he set out to make his own, and Yozh robot was born.

The robot certainly looks neat. There is a color TFT display, seven reflective sensors pointing down, two laser time-of-flight sensors facing forward, an IMU, and some LEDs. There are plenty of expansion ports, too. You can check out the code that runs it, too.

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The 2023 Hackaday Prize Is Ten, First Challenge Is Educational

March 28, 2023 by 6 Comments

If you were anywhere near Hackaday over the weekend, you certainly noticed that we launched the tenth annual Hackaday Prize! In celebration of the milestone, we picked from our favorite challenges of years past and came up with four of our favorite, and even one new one just to keep you on your toes. But the first challenge round is running right now, so get your hacking motors turning.

Re-engineering Education

The first challenge this year showcases educational projects, but broadly construed. Hackers tend to learn best by doing. In the Re-engineering Education challenge, we want you to help give others a chance to learn new skills. Whether you’re building a DIY radio kit, a breadboard-it-yourself computer, or even a demonstrator robot arm, if it helps pass on your hard-earned skills, we want you to enter it here.

It’s fresh on my mind because we were just playing with one this weekend, but [deshipu]’s Fluffbug robot project is a great inspiration for non-traditional education. What better way to discover the intricacies of four-legged walking machine gaits than to have one to play with on your desktop? It’s not going to take over the world, but if you can make it walk, you’ve learned something.

More obviously educational is [Joan Horvath]’s Hacker Calculus, an entry in last year’s Prize. The connections between a function’s height, and the area or volume that it integrates up to can be awfully abstract. Printing out 3D models of the resulting shapes can really help to bring the point home. Or maybe you could really drive home the speed of a comet in its orbit with a physical model? They’ve got you covered, but also ideas for generating your own plastic math toys.

When we think educational computer builds, the amazing reproduction of the WDC-1 “Working Digital Computer” by [Michael Gardi] springs instantly to mind, but perhaps it goes too far down the rabbit hole. Just another rung up on the complexity ladder gets you the Blinking Computer by [Tony Robinson]. Or if you want to figure out how an almost-commercial Z80 computer works from the ground up, consider the Baffa 2.

So what skills do you have that you want to teach other hackers? Can you embody that in a project?

All the Challenges

If you don’t have education in your sights, have a look at the rest of the 2023 Hackaday Prize Challenge rounds. We’re sure you’ll find something you like.

To enter, simply set up a project on Hackaday.io. When the challenge is running, you’ll be able to enter. Full rules over at the 2023 Hackaday Prize landing page.

Challenge Date The Details
Re-engineering Education March 25 – April 25 Educational projects of all stripes welcome. If the goal is to teach, enter it here.
Assistive Tech April 25 – May 30 The Assistive Tech challenge calls for projects that help people with disabilities to learn, work, move around, and simply live their lives to the fullest.
Green Hacks May 30 – July 4 Help reduce our impact on the planet. Do more with less, or help clean up the mess.
Gearing Up July 4 – August 8 Hackers build their own tools. What have you made that makes your making easier? Share it with us.
Wildcard August 8 – September 12 This is where anything goes. The wildcard challenge lets your projects speak for themselves.

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Antweight Combat Robot Tips, Shared From Experience

December 18, 2022 by 1 Comment

[Harry]’s newest robot, the MotherLoader V2, looks fantastic but was ultimately more of a learning experience and test bed for some experimental features. Luckily for us, [Harry] created a lengthy write-up detailing everything that he tried and revised.

3D printing and aluminum both feature heavily in antweight robots, in part because when contestants are limited to 150 grams it’s safe to say that every bit counts. We recommend reading [Harry]’s entire article to get all the details, but here are some of the bigger takeaways.

Treads provide a lot of contact surface, but there are a lot of ways they can go wrong. Pliability and grip have to be good matches for the robot’s design, otherwise the tread might bunch up or otherwise perform poorly when trying to maneuver. [Harry] had several dud efforts, but ended up with a great result by borrowing an idea from another competitor: composite tracks.

These have an inner track printed from flexible TPU filament, and an outer layer formed by casting silicone directly onto the 3D printed core. It’s a somewhat involved process, but the result is a durable and custom-fitted inner track on the inside, and a softer grip outside. Best of both worlds, and easily tailored to match requirements.

Speaking of TPU, [Harry] discovered that it can be worth printing structural parts with TPU. While ABS is usually the material of choice for durable components, printing solid parts in TPU has a lot to recommend it when it comes to 150 gram robots. Not only can TPU parts be stiff enough to hold up structurally, but they can really take a beating and happily spring back into shape afterwards.

We’ve seen [Harry]’s work before on antweight combat robots, and it’s always nice to peek behind the scenes and gaze into the details. Especially for processes like this, where failures are far more educational than successes.

Do Your Part To Stop The Robot Uprising

October 21, 2020 by 11 Comments

One of the pleasures of consuming old science fiction movies and novels is that they capture the mood of the time in which they are written. Captain Kirk was a 1960s guy and Picard was a 1990s guy, after all. Cold war science fiction often dealt with invasion. In the 1960s and 70s, you were afraid of losing your job to a computer, so science fiction often had morality tales of robots running amok, reminding us what a bad idea it was to give robots too much power. As it turns out, robots might be dangerous, but not for the reasons we thought. The robots won’t turn on us by themselves. But they could be hacked. To that end, there’s a growing interest in robot cybersecurity and Alias Robotics is releasing Alurity, a toolbox for robot cybersecurity.

Currently, the toolbox is available for Linux and MacOS with some support for Windows. It targets 25 base robots including the usual suspects. There’s a white paper from when the product entered testing available if you want more technical details.

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Autonomous Multi-Task Performing Robot

September 14, 2020 by No comments

[Ruchir] has been pretty into robotics for a while now and has always been amused by the ever-popular obstacle avoiding robot, but wanted something that could do more. So, like any good hacker, he decided to build something himself.

He wanted to incorporate all the popular beginner robot capabilities into a single invention. His robot can follow a line, detect an obstacle, and retrieve an object without switching between modes. It can even follow another robot, which is pretty neat.

His robot has a lot of the hardware you would expect. It uses a Raspberry Pi for all the heavy image processing, has optical sensors for line following and obstacle avoidance, and includes a speaker for audio feedback. What’s especially cool is the impressive interface, called the Regbot GUI, that [Ruchir] is using with his robot. According to the Wiki page, the Regbot GUI appears to accompany an educational robotics platform developed by Professor Jens Christian Andersen of the Technical University of Denmark for teaching controls to engineering students. [Ruchir] was able to adapt the GUI to his particular bot no problem.

Using the Regbot GUI, [Ruchir] can monitor all the robot’s sensor data in real-time (accelerometer, gyroscope, distance sensor, servo, encoder, etc.), dynamically adjust its calibration settings if needed, or even provide a universal killswitch in case the unthinkable happens. We’d say it’s definitely worth a look before you embark on your next robotics project.

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IRobot Makes Learning Robot More Affordable

August 6, 2020 by 10 Comments

When you think of iRobot, you probably think of floor cleaning or military robots. But they also have a set of robots aimed at education. The Root robot — an acquisition the company made in 2019 — originally targeted classrooms and cost about $200 each. A new version costs about $130 and is a better fit for home users.

The original version  — Root rt1 — is still available, but the rt0 version has several missing features to hit the desired price. What’s missing? Apparently, the rt1 can stick to a whiteboard using magnets, but that feature is missing on the rt0. There are also no “cliff” sensors or color scanner.

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Let’s Take A Closer Look At This Robotic Airship

July 22, 2020 by 30 Comments

It’s not a balloon, however shiny its exterior may seem. This miniature indoor robotic airship created by the University of Auckland mechanical engineering research group [New Dexterity] is an asymmetric system experimenting with the possibilities of an open-source helium-based airship.

Why a helium airship, as opposed to a fixed wing aircraft? The group wanted to experiment with the advantages of lighter-than-air (LTA) travel, namely the higher mobility and looser path planning constraints. Furthermore, LTA airships have a less obstructed field of vision and fewer locomotion issues. While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) may be capable of hovering in one place, their lift is generated by rotor thrust, which drains their batteries quickly in the order of minutes. LTA airships can hover for longer periods of time.

The design was created for educational and research purposes, focusing on the financial feasibility of manufacturing the platform, the environmental impact of the materials, and the helium loss through the balloon-like envelope. By measuring these parameters, the researchers are able to study the effects of circumstances such as the cost of indoor commercial balloons and the mechanical properties of balloon materials.

The airship gondola was designed and 3D printed in a modular fashion, then attached to the envelope with Velcro. The placement with respect to the horizontal symmetry of the gondola was done for flight stability, with several configurations tested for the side rotor angle.

The group open-sourced their CAD files and ROS interface for controlling the airship. They primarily use off-the-shelf components such as Raspberry Pi boards, propellers, a DC single brushed motor driver carrier, and LiPo batteries for a total cost of $90 for the platform, with an addition $20 for the balloon and initial helium filling. The price is comparable to the cost of indoor blimps like the Blimpduino 2.0.

You can check out the completed airship below, where the team demonstrates its path following capabilities based on a carrot chasing path finding algorithm. And if you’re interested in learning more about the gotchas of building lighter-than-air vehicles, check out [Sophi Kravitz’s] blimp talk from Hackaday Belgrade.

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