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

We finally got the robot back in our hands. Today is our first day pulling apart the robot and its arm, and to say the least, it looks like something out of the ‘hood’. The whole camera assembly was being held on by zip ties and duct tape – some redesigns on the assembly might...Read More

Matthew ran into a couple of issues while attempting to edit some of the original .stl files from Thingiverse, more specifically not being able to edit said models in Autodesk Inventor.  After a quick google search, he discovered that to convert .stl files into .dwg files, he needed to use Autodesk 3DSMax. However, he quickly...Read More

Alex, Mr Elias, Mr Crane, Mr Pham and the rest of the senior robotics team returned from the international Robocup competition in China on the weekend, and, anticipating a full day of discovering what changes had been made to the robot during the competition, Ryan, Matthew and I exchanged many words with Alex. Upon discovering...Read More

We tried a number of different ways to get the Raspberry Pi streaming video to another device without success. It’s surprising that there’s no easy way to do this. After a lot of research and trying a number of tutorials, I found a tutorial by Miguel Grinberg, which looks promising. Unfortunately, we just don’t have...Read More

I tidied up the cable management on the robot, adding heatshrink to the Pi power connector to reduce the chance of an arc or short. When done, I wrote the logs for days 30 to 33. Matthew started setting up the Raspberry Pi 2 after we realised that the Raspberry Pi B+ may not have...Read More