ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

I keep ending up with a list of things to mention, but not enough time to do it (or not enough material for a full post), so here's a brief roundup of a few things. So in no particular order... The HALE mission has put out a nice YouTube video, showcasing some of the video as well as the still photos from the ground team end of the mission. It also gives (at the end) a run-down of some of the faces & names involved. Take a look, and enjoy the music & presentation. HALE YouTube Mission Steve Hassenplug has come up with a novel robotics game he's named "PSumo" (for "programmable sumo"). The idea isn't to make fantastically complicated or fast sumo robots, but instead to make a series of nearly equal robots that casual observers can "program" by using RFID cards swiped by a sensor on the robot. It was a huge hit at the recent Brickfair event on the east coast, and I'm sure we'll see it a lot of other places. We'll probably have...

First, I'm sad to say that the recently posted (& fantastic!) image of balloon shards falling to earth was not from my payload Gypsy, but from Eric Wang's SLR payload. It seems that for some reason (Gremlins? Bionicles? Jack Stone?), Gypsy's SD card is empty - the payload took an initial picture upon start-up (as it's supposed to, to show it was working), but for some reason it didn't work after that. I've no idea what went wrong, and it's very troubling (& you can BET I'm going to try to figure it out)... but that's some of the risks & mysteries of this sort of thing. To be honest, overall I'm still amazed at how well it went. The team took a big gamble on having Lil' Joe free-fall - it was risky (for their equipment), and required them to do three retrievals when usually they have to do just one. Yet Lil' Joe worked. Well, close anyway... I'll put up some data graphs soon, but Lil' Joe had a rough ride, slamming i...

The above photo was taken at approx. 100,000 feet by a Mindstorms-powered camera. (Brian: I assume that this shot is from your own payload camera--is that right)? HALE press release is here .

Here us a picture of what appears to be the recovered Payloads from the HALE mission . They all seem to be intact. FLL Team 90's payload is the third one from the left. It looks like the UV filter pinwheel ( an old CD case) had survived the trip. Although, I'm not sure what is dangling from the corner of the box. The pinwheel may have caught some of the balloon shreds on the way down. The kids produced a nice little document of the FLL Team 90 Payload internals here . I am confident that the team will learn something about Earth science and Global Warming through this program. We are treating our participation as a FIRST LEGO League research project for the upcoming season’s challenge , so I expect that the team has learned how to seek out the advice of experts in the field, came up with their own solutions through experimentation, document their work and had lots of fun in the process. Thanks to Eric Wang, Brian Davis, Dave Parker, and others for taking the time to an...

8:16 AM EDT, 5:16 AM PDT: Today is the launch day, and it looks like the team has gotten things started (it's 8:07 AM here, but 5:07 AM at the launch site). Unfortunately it looks the public view page for the SPOT units isn't working at the moment, but I'll try to keep you in the loop via edits to this blog post, and the ham radio links at KD7UCE-11 and KE7BQV-11 should be up soon. The launch site sits at roughly 4,700', and the team camped at it last night - the first SPOT tracking data of the morning just came on-line about 5:07 local time at the launch site, so things are starting to happen. 9:52 EDT, 6:52 PDT: LAUNCH! Balloon #2, carrying an SLR camera payload, FLL Team 90's payload, the LEGO Mindstorms Team's payload, Gypsy, Lil' Joe, and the "NXT" communications payload just launched from the Nevada desert! Everything looks good at launch, although conditions have gotten slightly windier... but it's going up! Next launch in perhaps 30 ...

While Lil’ Joe sports a fairly simple program, Gypsy ended up as one of the more complex programs I’ve written in NXT-G. The program (still named “Nadar”) really needed to handle several different tasks at once. Primarily a photographic platform, it had to be able to operate the camera in both still & video modes, and take interesting pictures while controlling the platform. As a secondary goal, it needed to datalog the numerous environmental sensors hooked up, as well as “engineering data” (like battery voltage, platform angle, motor noise, etc.). On top of this, it needed to monitor and control the payload temperature, critical to keeping the payload alive. And to complicate all of this, the program needed to be as small as possible, leaving as much memory as possible for datalogging. In order to handle the photographic challenge, the program uses the same approach as the original Nadar: following a script . It reads a series of timed commands from a text file (think of it as a “...

There's been some new information posted at the HALE website that I thought might make for a fun heads-up on the mission. First, the payload allocations for the two balloons has been put up. Each balloon will be carrying a ham radio that will transmit GPS information down, as well as a SPOT transmitter that will be doing the same thing. The first balloon will carry: LUXPAK, Brix-Catcher, Peeps-in-Space, a separate student payload (no name), the "Energizer" communications payload Reel-E, & a video camera payload (a.k.a National Instruments) designed to "look up" through the mission to try to get video of the dynamics at cut down (OK... what it looks like to have your balloon pop 100,000' above the ground). The second balloon will lift several more payloads: a SLR camera payload that has flown before, FLL Team 90, the LEGO Mindstorms Teams submission, Gypsy, Lil' Joe, & a "Giant NXT" communications payload. The communication payloads are...

Gypsy is the second of my two payloads on the HALE mission , and while somewhat less risky, it’s far more complex. It’s based on an earlier prototype I built called “Nadar” , (named after the first person to do aerial photography). The idea was simple: I wanted to make a payload that would control an otherwise unmodified (no cutting & soldering) camera to take both pictures and video. That required not only a small camera, but one the NXT could be used to switch between modes on, from still to video & back again. I ended up with a Nikon COOLPIX L11, which uses a slider switch on the back to switch between modes. With some difficulty, I came up with a LEGO lead screw assembly that would reliably move the switch, and a second motor that could press both the power and the shutter button. That left the third motor to control where the camera was pointed. I played with the idea of a rotating mirror, but the mount for the mirror and the mirror itself represented a significant weight...

While I'm still working refining the payloads with the folks who will be launching the HALE mission , I thought I'd at least put up a few more facts and pictures about them here in the blog. Of my two payloads, Lil' Joe is perhaps the most ambitious... or riskiest. Looking somewhat like a blue loaf of bread with a tailfin, the goal is to replicate, in a very small (& cheap!) way, the famous leap of Col. Joseph Kittinger from over 100,000'. The NXT will try a much more modest goal: being released from roughly 80,000', it will free-fall for a short period of time (something like 20 seconds to a minute or more - the exact length of time is under discussion) before "reeling out" the tailfin, which then functions (I hope!) as a drogue 'chute to pull the main parachute out of the body. There will be no control from the ground, or even communication, with the payload during this process - either the NXT "does it on it's own", or the Nevada ...

Event will take place July 28-August 2 in Reno, Nevada.