Blog

Song recc: Steal my girl – One Direction Second blog of the day – on that grind Its getting hot in here!!! Flexo got a...

PREP & PRACTICE DAY! song recommendation of the day: Last Resort – Papa Roach Per yesterdays results, Flexo had DESTROYED the tracks, DEMOLISHED the time,...

Over the past few days we’ve made some exciting locomotion advancements. Connor created Sights motor wrapper plugins for RoboClaw and Roboteq motor controllers, Alex authored...

On Tuesday evening we had our first test of the new S.A.R.T. Series M robot with all systems functioning at the same time. During our...

One of the requirements for the Major competition is to generate a top-down floor plan of the room in which the test takes place. Ideally,...

Today I worked mostly on testing and familiarizing myself with our development robot, which we as a team named ‘Bender’. To begin the day, I...

Here’s how we got our Jetson Nano working reliably with an Intel Wireless AC 3165 PCIe WiFi card. This post outlines the steps someone else...

For years, power has always been something we have constantly been seeking to improve. Most robots and other remote/portable applications utilise LiPo batteries. While flexible...

It was July of 2016, and by our rough calculations we had about twelve months to develop a reliable robot for the competition the next...

Alex had returned from China with a plethora of ideas for potential improvements to the platform we were developing on, including both the hardware and...

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Alexander Cavalli, Jack Williams, Matthew Williams, Graham Stock, Charlotte Drury, Anthony Gambale, Michael Cavalli, Nathaniel Kneebone, Martin Hosking, Alexander Thorning Published: 20th...

The wheels we made for the Mark III robot did pretty well. The new polyurethane tires were excellent, they had plenty of grip, were basically...

The SIGHTS software suite is designed to be very extensible when it comes to adding new sensors to your robot. We achieve this by using...

A brief history of two-way audio In previous years, we have used a few methods to do two-way audio. Initially we had a speech to...

The recently released SIGHTS (SART Integrated GUI and Host Teleoperation Service) software suite is designed to work with virtually any RMRC robot setup. However, with...

Here at S.A.R.T. we are proud to announce the release… of SIGHTS. No, it’s not a network of spy satellites. We aggressively forced the name...

On the 16th of October 2019, the Australian Federal Police Bomb Response unit was called to the premises of SFX. Fortunately, it wasn’t because there...

Hey there, it’s Anthony, ready to bring an end to this epic trilogy of identifying hazmat signs. In this part we will cover how we...

Hi, it’s Anthony again. I’m here to make an addition to the first part of this series, which really belongs in that blog post, but...

Hi, this is Anthony. I’ve not written a blog post about the vision stuff yet because I’ve been too busy actually working on it. The...

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Alexander Cavalli, Graham Stock, Charlotte Drury, Anthony Gambale, Michael Cavalli, Nathaniel Kneebone, Martin Hosking Published: 19th of June, 2019 License: This work...

In a previous blog post, I wrote about using the official Arduino IDE with the on-board Arduino 101 on the UDOO x86 Ultra. Since our...

Hello! It’s Barney again. I am here to give a few updates regarding S.A.R.T’s progress, considering we haven’t had an update for cough two months...

Authors: Connor Kneebone, Matthew Williams, Jack Williams, Alexander Cavalli, Aaron Maggs, Ryan Ewyk, Riley Cockerill, Michael Cavalli, Charlotte Drury, Graham Stock, Ryan Millard-Cartwright Published: 17th...

Say hello to SFX’s new SART team! This year’s team consists of three year 11’s, Barney Bruckner, Martin Hosking, Anthony Gambale and two year 12’s,...

Hello! I am Barney, I’ll be taking over autonomy for the next two years for S.A.R.T. This post isn’t actually about the progress of autonomy,...

An issue we’ve commonly faced while operating our robot is that the servos will keep spinning if the script crashes or if we exit the...

Now that we have a rather nice PID controller, it’s time to test it! Enjoy responsibly Using just a PID controller alone, we can implement...

In light of the recent drop test debacle, we’ve decided on a new infill pattern for the wheel hub. The infill that we used for...

The S.A.R.T. performed a drop test! We were pretty sure our robot would survive, but we’d never done a proper test before. We figured, now...

As I talked about in a previous post, half of our servos weren’t working. Of course, I was going to try to fix them before...

One of our other major issues in Canada were the USB ports. Due to the small size of our robot, we needed to have right...

The competition was over. Well, truthfully, we were a bit bummed out about it. We knew we had a good robot and if it had...

Today we headed to the venue confident that we could scrape in a few points by the end of the competition. That night before, we...

Today was our first day of competition. Everything we had worked on for the past six to nine months was leading up to today. We...

Today was the first day we spent at the venue. It was the practice day for all teams where we could all put our robots...

Today was one of the only days where we could sleep in, so we woke up at around 9:00 am and headed for breakfast, thinking...

Our first day out of school and our first day of travel to Canada. Our trip started at the Canberra airport at 4:45am where all...

The time is drawing near that the crew heads off to Canada! Since my last update on the wheels, we’ve made some slight changes to...

It has the consistency of jam and smells like jam and tastes like jam but is not jam, then what is it? You guessed it,...

We need to plug in a rather large number of sensors to the UDOO x86 Ultra’s built-in Arduino. During the testing and programming phase, a...

This post is going to go into more detail about the different changes that had to be made to the body and how we made...

Time to start working on the wheels. With the help of Mr Stock and Nick from Year 11 I’ve successfully modeled the hub and tyre...

Cameras are going to be a huge part of our robot (Mainly in terms of importance, but it just so happens that they are some...

Having the Arduino onboard the UDOO is a godsend. It removes the need for a separate (and bulky) Arduino to act as an intermediary. The...

The previous team used a product called PolyShield, which is a tough, flexible dip that protects, insulates and seals almost any surface. Color codes all...

We have just submitted our updated Team Description Materials for 2018. In addition to last year’s TDM, it covers a number of improvements and additions...

So hey, first post for me. Heya! Figured I’d write something about the random ideas and designs I’ve collected since joining S.A.R.T., so here we...

Last year the old team’s chassis had a square hole instead of servo mounts as well as screws which meant that the wheels could be flipped but...

We have currently been researching a new and greatly improved way of knowing the position of the robot on the field using cameras. We had...

Today the team spent time in discussion with our new mentors, discussing the current stage of the robot. A number of decisions were made, regarding...

We’re the new S.A.R.T team, and we’re in charge now. We are Connor, Ben, Erin, and Kyle. Now that that’s out of the way; we...

Day 6 was another – unintended – early morning, giving us time to make our way to the Aichi University Nagoya Campus for the 21st...

Finals: Finally. Not final practice finals. Final finals – the finale. Finally. We rose at 7 AM for breakfast on the final day, after only...

It was another early morning for the S.A.R.T on Friday the 28th of July. The preliminary or qualifying runs were due to start at 1...

The 27th of July was the first day of RoboCup 2017. In our division, the Rapidly Manufactured Robot League, the first day was designated a...

You’ve read all about Ryan’s “movement.py” script, so now it’s time to learn about “controlscript.php” – the script that collects client keystrokes and sends the...

We’ve recently been talking about the sensors we want to implement on the robot. We were interested in some sort of mapping or distance detection,...