He is BACK !!

So , week 12 is coming to an end. Its time to say our goodbyes and hello to exams !
Before venturing into exam paradise, let me show you a sneak preview to the work of Semester TWO !

Nick giving pressure to Nazira and Karen from RC3

Currently, the first Single Processor Motherboard (housing one Snapper Unit) has been finalised(yeah , "sort of", but its there). We designed it using a software call Altium Designer 6 (formerly Protel) in which a schematic was drawn. Drawing schematic its easy, however when u look at the big picture after , I realised that , "hey i have 50 capacitors on my board , thats cool" but ... i still have to route them MANUALLY ... gosh ...routing nightmare.

Me giving pressure to Shubham

Hmm , ever wonder how small our Snapper Module is ? now lets see ...

See this little beast ? Its THAT small, smaller that the standard name cards. Houses the big beast of them all a PXA255 processor (formerly owned by Intel) , smaller beasts like a Cyclone FPGA (Cyclone III will be out soon), LAN interface, UARTS, USB, SDRAM,MMC , Audio , LCD .. etc etc and the lists goes on.







So, how does our motherboard look like ? Wanna see ? but its confidential. So sorry, can't do that :(

Poor Wen from RC2 got his ahem kicked

But i'm kind ... i'll show you anyway ...

So the white paper on top of the green board (base board of the robot) is our "preview" motherboard and you can see where Snapper would be sitting on it in the near future.

The baseboard would be where RC3 (Ball Control Team) whips up their magic.

Hopefully after the exams, we'll be done facing our routing nightmare and the single snapper board would be out in say ...
middle of July ? yeah i hope.


Nick at it again



So as semester two beckons and exam days lies near, good luck to all Fourth Years in their exams and project. Endeavour guys, the BBQ was good. Thank you !

Special thanks to David for the help all semester long !

We close the curtains on Semester One with our little friend ... HE IS BACK ....






See you in Semester TWO !

DID ANYONE BREAK THE CODE ?

Nearing the end of Sem 1 ....

12 weeks ..of sem 1 are nearing an end ..phew .. 12 weeks passed so fast. Was a pretty eventful day today in the labs. Starting right from the morning , Nick calls me up at 10 saying Iven wants to see the rought draft and then was pressed the panic mode button as the report was not even half way but we finally managed to finish it up before 4 PM and emailed him the report , waiting for the feedback from him ...... The email client "Melbourne University's email client " gave me the most weird warning today while I was emailing the report .. "NULL characters found in your email " whats the crap .. can someone please explain to me ..and Dej ( oh yeah ..dej is David our "cool" supervisor :P ) just replied to me that he recieved several copies of my email .. hehe ..

Also had this BBQ arranged by endeavour group for all the 4th yr EE students . Excellent stuff by them and had a nice time there , seeing how can "some" people eat so much , well realising engineers can do all sort of weird stuff. Also had this photo session in the "robocup" labs ..which we will post up soon.

I just realised we havent written any techical stuff on the blog so far , ooh yeah okk lets use some big words and scare some people with these terms . After the change in the design , that is , RC2 deciding to use the same processor board as us ( we are btw ..RC1 ) we need to write Device drivers in linux. We need device drivers to actually get the data which there Cyclone FPGA will process to the block device and so that it could be an input to the AI and can be processed further. Have absolutely no idea how to start writing them and I wish we also had something like this for our project ..


Dej is going to email Bluewaters ( another character in the RC1 story for 2007 , they are our kind and generous sponsors who gave development boards worth $5000 to us for half the price.. see how nice they are :P)

Well as exams are coming up soon so we will be a bit slow concentrating more on them but will keep posted ..till then ciao..

LAyout Change

There's been a slight change. Currently RC3(Control) that is has 4 Microcontrollers will be reduced down to only one. This means less complexity for them but layout changes for us. However the new layout looks good. And we have more space now. Good to also know we have been doing our project correctly.

Midway report is also out of the way so we can start channelling our attention on routing the PCB once exams are over.

Still PCB-ing

We just settled the issue of the many power supplies which we have to have on our board. Now it's just a 5V and a 3.3V making life easier.
PCB design should be okay.. We don't even need voltage translation. Things seem to be going on fine at the moment.

DS3. Thank God I took DS3. Termination will come back to haunt when we design our multi processor motherboard.. At the moment, however, we are still not sure if termination is necessary for our single processor motherboard. Might have to.

Vision is going to sit on the motherboard as well. RC2(vision team) will be using the our (Motherboard Team) Snapper's FPGA for their image processing. Now we can directly obtain data from the FPGA!

Shubbhy.. good job with the vision codes.

Giving the robots their Vision !!!

I just realised how dumb can a Robot be !! It just understands 2 things they are a "0" or "1" ..imagine a human could just understand zeros or one , how boring can life get then.

These days I am writing code for the vision part of RC1 which involves decoding the data which the camera spits out so thats a stream of 0's and 1's to what a "Robot" can understand.

The robot has to first find out where its located on the field first then , it has to look at the target object and then make a path to attack that target object and then decide which speed to run at the object and then move towards it ..

It may sound a bit too simple but its not that easy when it comes to the actual implementation.

PCBBB

we've gotta spit out our first PCB soon. well good news is most of the schematic components are readily available.

Another piece of goodnews. Coding for local angle(angle between robo and target) is easy to find. Our concern on whether the angle calculated from robo's direct vision(directly off the mirror) was the ACTUAL angle, was solved. thanks Girish. Local angle can be easily calculated. Robots can turn to face the target fast. However, this is all just talk. we shall see how it goes when implemented.. i can't wait.

The Field is in the House

So we set up the field today, everyone was there to carry the green carpet and blue coloured goal from Boydex Labs. So now we have a football field in the special labs (yeah Robocup people are given this Special Lab) !! Took pictures of what the robots see as what Nick posted earlier. Wonder when would the next Special Labs World Cup would be while breaking a few monitors ...

But anyway, people always think engineers are boring. Well, just wanna prove a point that. We ARE TOTALLY DIFFERENT. We special people ( *hints* Robocup people) do a lots of crazy stuff in the labs. You know, its quite stressful in the lab when we are up with some problems with software or hardware.

To relieve it we do ...








Yeah, Moonwalking with our lovely orange ball.




and sometimes ...

**Where did u hide my money ! **

And to Endeavour people ! sorry if we bothered you since your office is just beside us :)
Yeah heard you guys were looking for the guy who keeps singing in the labs ? One hint i can give you is , he wears a yellow shirt almost everyday and is a friend of the Robocup people :) Keep a look out for him !

And to the kids , DO NOT TRY THE STUNTS AT HOME !

till then ... c ya !

BREAK THE CODE

Some Progress

VISION.. This is what robo sees. cool huh... 3D vision.

Today's been good. After our long hrs of trying to figure out how to mount the pendrive on Snapper, D.Jahshan got it working for us in less than a minute. Finally we managed to compile some programs.

Now the next thing would be to work on our PCB and hopefully we can get ROBO running soon. We're still waiting for the schematics and footprints from our sponsors. But they shouldn't take long. They have been quite efficient in responding to our mails.

The Awakening

After the long wait, it has finally awaken. We managed to get connect to the module after Khor's countless efforts of trying to gain access.

It was a big run in a loop thinking we needed to install open embedded in before we could get started. That was really a big road block to our progress.

More to comeeee!!!!!! Tmr's project day. Hope things come along well!

Btw, the picture was kindly taken by RC3's very own Nasira

Lost Lost Lost !!!!

After so many days I am coming back to the blog , well we been planning the stuff all the while and now when our stuff has FINALLY arrived after the Longest wait ever we are trying to do stuff. We were waiting for the hardware component from US.
I am working on the vision part of RC. I have to figure out whether the image RC2 passes me is it a ball or not ,but the question is how will i do it HOW HOW HOW ??