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 script via CTRL+C. I’ve always had the stop_servos.py script for this exact purpose but it has to be executed manually after exiting the main script, i.e. python3 stop_servos.py. This script...Read More
On our way to autonomy, one of the things we need to have is the ability for the robot to centre itself left and right in the course as it moves forward. First, I’ll explain what a PID controller is and how we will use it on our robot. PID stands for Proportional-Integral-Derivative controller. It’s...Read More
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 we spend anymore money on new ones, so that’s what I did today. Some of them were broken for certain, they either didn’t show up at all when connected or...Read More
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, polyurethane resin. As a side note: if it gets to the point where you need me to tell you that polyurethane is bad for you, then I think it’ll come...Read More
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 of the largest components in the robot, save for the UDOO). So making sure we have them working efficently, at good quality and reliably is of utmost importance. We ran...Read More
Our two USB2AX dynamixel servo interfaces arrived in the mail today. We purchased these as they’re a far smaller alternative to the USB2Dynamixel (see image below) or the OpenCM board. We also don’t have to mess around with another layer of code (as we would on the OpenCM) – communication is direct. After reading the...Read More
We didn’t spend long on the robot today, just a few minutes to get the main body finished. Matthew and I have removed the excess plastic from the two front wheels. Matthew attached them to the robot after holes were punched by Riley using a screwdriver.Read More
