Category

Major

S.A.R.T Development Blog following the iterations and breakthroughs the team makes to all things hardware and software for the Major Rescue league.

24
Jun

UBECcer Watch Out

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 a new servo controller for the arm, and Jack jerry-rigged a system to run multiple motor wrappers at once. The following video highlights the fruits of our labours. After this...
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24
Jun

Target Translation

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 tests we noticed some of the arm positions caused unnecessary strain on the servos, so we tightened the maximum servo ranges to prevent damage. This meant that some of the...
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24
Jun

Using Hardware Acceleration in VNC

‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ I’d like to slightly modify that statement to ‘Any solution to a technology problem that works for an inexplicable reason is indistinguishable from magic’. Here’s why: The S.A.R.T. recently acquired a pair of stereoscopic cameras for use in creating a 3D model of the environment, complete with...
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24
Jun

Extracting a floor plan from a ZED Mini model using Blender

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, this would happen automatically, however until we get that working we can use the exported 3D model created by the ZED Mini and a bit of post-processing in Blender to...
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22
Jun

Nvidia Jetson Nano with Intel Wireless AC PCIe WiFi

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 used to solve this issue on the Nvidia developer forums, but the solution was spread over multiple posts whereas this one puts all those steps in one place.  Depending on...
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