Ryan took the robot home to work on it over the public holiday. He spent the day working with Oarkit’s script for controlling the servos. He put hours of hard work into finding out the dilemma of why neither our code nor Oarkit’s worked on our robot. He finally figured out that it was the...Read More

We discovered a more sophisticated robot design on the internet, which gave us inspiration for a better design (to compete in the National Competition).  Riley and Matthew worked together to decide what parts would be made with different materials and their measurements. The camera apparatus that was mounted to the robot broke today, because of...Read More

We have started designing the breakout board that will direct power from the lithium polymer battery to the Raspberry Pi, the Dynamixel servos, and anything else that needs power. We have cannibalised a USB mini cable, cutting off the standard USB end and exposing the red 5v wire and the black ground wire to power...Read More

Matthew and Riley printed a few more camera mounts, in case the ones we currently have break. This was an issue we found with the store-bought camera mounts. Aaron is working on connecting a Raspberry Pi to a Linux system. Ryan and I have decided to re-write the two programs required to control the robot,...Read More

Riley downloaded Inventor, and Matthew is going to teach him the basics so he can design and print models, as he wants to experiment with the chassis, modifying it so it has telescopic capabilities and is more flexible and stable. I made a video showing how to set up the daisy-chained Dynamixel servos (posted on...Read More

Riley and Matthew replaced the tape on the 3D printer bed and reapplied glue, then began printing the newly designed camera mounting apparatus that Matthew had made in Inventor.  Printing at 100% infill and with a layer height of 0.05mm, it took take a while but is going to be extremely strong. Ryan installed Python...Read More

Ryan and I discussed how the PlayStation controller will be used to control the robot. We mapped most of the buttons and both joysticks to various robot functions, and also created a small program to print strings such as “Moving forward” or “Instant Speed Boost” when the R2 and X buttons are pressed respectively. The...Read More

Upon arriving at school, we discovered that the gear arm we started printing the previous day had been misplaced.  As a result, we had to start printing it again, then about halfway through the print, we noticed that the end was peeling up (this occasionally happens if you don’t have enough adhesive on the print...Read More

After some testing with Dynamixel Wizard, I discovered an issue with the claw mount servo. Mounted in the way it was, the arm would not be able to rotate all the way to the front of the robot. To fix this, Riley removed the arm, rotated the servo 90 degrees forward and then reattached it,...Read More

Ryan and I connected a single Dynamixel servo to the Dynamixel2USB and the SMPS2Dynamixel, but had trouble connecting more than one. We soon discovered that the IDs of the servos would have to be assigned individually, and searching for the unassigned servos with Dynamixel Wizard would not work. So, we connected each servo individually and...Read More