After a long hiatus, the team return to the project. Today, we set up a test print of our new modular chassis, which will take at least 10-12 hours. I made a few changes were made to the modular clip to increase the strength, however after some discussion we have now moved to a different...Read More

After taking home a 3D printer over the holidays, Matthew and I are working on designing the new modular chassis. Below is a modular locking “clip” mechanism I designed. It looks promising and is likely we will be using something similar to this on the final robot.Read More

Paper jam? Not quite. Although it does involve printers. 3D printers. Our new modular locking system is complete but has not been printed, and therefore has not been tested, and therefore has not been incorporated into the robot chassis. We have three 3D printers at our school, however the main one that we have used...Read More

Our team 3D design expert Matthew designed the new chassis for the robot, and then after a discussion with myself and Mr Elias, began to create a locking mechanism that would allow for a fully modular robot. One of the prototypes pictured above is a double-locking system with two stages of security. The first is...Read More

The team met for the first time since Robocup, but with OpenCV installed and working, we began to make some actual progress. Before we start describing that, it’s important to note that we now have an easy way to transfer files to and from the Pi without the need for a USB mass storage device....Read More

Robocup Regionals! I took the robot home overnight to install the necessary packages such as NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, OpenCV and ffmpeg. On the day, we got off to a great start, being super prepared with a fully functioning robot – we wish.  There’s still a whole bunch of stuff we needed to do – and...Read More

Using the camera mounted cleverly by Matthew’s camera mount apparatus, I took a collection of test photographs and determined that the image must be flipped vertically and horizontally to perfectly represent what the robot is looking at. The piece of paper in the image above was placed under the right side of the robot, so...Read More

Matthew worked on designing a static camera mount for the Pi Camera, which will face down at the ground in order to make line following more efficient.  We plan to have 2 cameras on the robot, one for line following and another that will stream to a remote machine – however, we still haven’t found...Read More

After having more trouble with the camera on a new Raspberry Pi, I worked on updating the firmware of said Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is currently fetching its latest package list. Once that is complete, the latest version of PiCamera will be installed so we can start working out where the camera should be...Read More

Matthew finished designing the new and improved robot chassis, with some inputs from myself and Ryan.  It will measure about 25cm wide when the servos and wheels are fully mounted.  As of yet we have no idea exactly how high it will be, however we are comfortable with the fact that it will probably fit...Read More