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Kicked off establishment of “Helper sessions” and making assistive devices in a talk at Xinchejian.
Seems like there is a fair bit of interest – so these sessions will hopefully be be ongoing and produce some fun and “usable devices” (haha).
The trimmed presentation (cut out the waffle about me) has been published here as pdf and odp because XCJ blog and wiki have file size and type restrictions.
Started Xinchejian wiki pages for “Helper sessions” and making assistive devices.
The two winners of of the SwarmRobot competition group prizes are:
Both entries scored well against most of the judging criteria and were evaluated as well deserved winners!
Emails have been sent to the prize winners. There were no winners in the individual category.
A big thanks to those who entered and also to all those who visited and especially the sites that provided links!
Reminder: Only a few days until entries close November 30, 2012, 6AM GMT
Your entry only has to be idea – you do not have to make anything to enter! Don’t be tricked by lack of visible updates about the competition, the web site traffic show that is is reasonable interest in the competition 🙂
All you need to do is write a submission on what you would do with the SwarmRobot PCBs. The winners will be those displaying the best spirit of open sharing and learning in what they intend to do with the PCBs and how they intend to do this.
Prizes 15 PCB pairs (main controller and IR shield).
Detailed information on the competition and how to enter can be found at:
Below are all the necessary details for the competition. Please discuss via this forum.
Update: Please indicate which category you are entering in your submission – Individual or Group.
One final hint in addition to all the criteria below and the hints in the original post: this competition is about ideas for what you hope to do with the SwarmRobot PCBs when you win!
Judging criteria for entries:
Rules
Legal stuff
We want everyone to have fun, and nobody to get sued. Welcome to the legal section.
Rules and legal inspiration taken from the awesome 555 Contest (via WayBackMachine) and DangerousPrototypes 7400 competitions.
Been thinking of running a competition to give away some free PCBs and now that I have your attention thanks to Slashdot, here goes:
Prizes 15 PCB pairs (main controller and IR shield).
To enter: Write a submission on what you would do with the SwarmRobot PCBs. The winners will be those displaying the best spirit of open sharing and learning in what they intend to do with the PCBs and how they intend to do this.
Hints:
Entries will close – near the end of November. Full details with closing time and how to submit will be published shortly. If you can’t wait – then look to how dangerousprototypes run the 7400 competition – loose and flexible rules, with core goals of encouragement and having fun!
UPDATES:
First day of the Shanghai Maker Carnival was today with exhibitors also attending from Beijing and Shenzhen.
It is part of the very large Creation Exhibition, an arts and crafts expo with about 200 exhibitors – #12, in Century Park Shanghai and runs from today Friday to Sunday 4 November 2012.
Today was a slow start as it was a work day and the weather windy and cool, especially by the lake, but I am sure tomorrow will bring lots more interesting items!
I prepared a small swarm of SwarmRobots running the new remote control code I just released. Some people surprised to see the SwarmRobots move, most were surprised to see group movement where each group does the same movements. A few people really “got” the demo mode.
Nearly everyone wanted to know why the remotes did not control just ONE SwarmRobot, or did not control ALL, but most struggled with the explanation of deliberate separation into different groups – until this was explained in Chinese! Maybe I should have stuck with my idea to use coloured flags and letters/numbers to indicate the groups, rather than just use the wheel colour! Main reasons I did not was it would transport harder and more effort to set up the flags at events.
Using standard TV/DVD remote to control robots – I thought people would instantly understand how to control the robots! Well as usual I was wrong, at least until you get people to think like controlling your DVD, then some get it, others takes some demonstration first!
The one lone SwarmRobot that was configured as an object follow SwarmRobot also raised questions – why not the same! It is good everyone understands that these are the same, but the idea that some behaved differently really raised some questions.
Several XinChejian members helped repairing battery connector wires and making more SwarmRobots. Some non-members also had fun finishing and making SwarmRobots – thanks guys!
The video shows three SwarmRobots being controlled by one InfraRed signal – sorry for the poor video quality.
Looking at ways to have some sort of SwarmRobot display for MakerCarnival in Shanghai in early November, found this AtTiny 2313 code which can decode RC5 IR. It compiled, loaded and ran (verified looking at serial data output), but it did not detect IR from several different remote controls tried.
Using this Arduino code, (which uses some really nice multi-protocol IR receive and transmit libraries) it was discovered that all the remote controls used where NEC protocol, not RC5! Research indicates the NEC protocol is very common in Asia!
Rather than find NEC code for the AtTiny, or write code decode NEC, I used the above library to send RC5 and now a SwarmRobot can receive commands and as the shows, several SwarmRobots can be controlled at the same time! Kept using RC5 because it actually sends two sets of information an ID and a command, so this really fits controlling robot X to do command Y, or group z of robots to all do same command.
The code is on GitHub: SwarmRobot AtTiny2313 and the Arduino transmitter.
Success:- Using one InfraRed transmitter LED and four receiver LEDs for 360 degree object avoidance. The program logic is very simple at present.
Unfortunately the setup is not yet reliable – works one day but not the next and there are still some initialisation issues.
Biggest issue seems to be that there are huge variations in the functionality of IR receiver LEDs and we have not found matching data sheets for the two types we are using!
The fantastic capability of the XinCheJian SwarmRobots has been recognised with 2nd placing in the AFRON $10 robot competition Traditional (Roaming) category. The announcement made at World Maker Faire today (via Wired) awarded first place to Harvard’s research group and third place by to MIT University. XinCheJian’s high placing against such prestigious competition highlights just how good XinCheJian’s SwarmRobots are!
The SwarmRobots are still under rapid development with work progressing on coding object detection and inter-robot communications using the already developed InfraRed shield. Work is also underway on wireless charging and a Atmel 32u4 version. It has been a lot of fun to be part of this team as can be seen in these videos!
