No longer will teams have to stare at a giant analog clock above the referee, we’ve gone digital!

The Sixth Annual Combots Cup is approaching, and with it some new time keeping widgets for the spectators as well as the drivers.

Here’s a peak at what I’ve been working on:

Those are three 7-Segment Display Big Digit Driver kits from Evil Mad Science!

The plan is to remove the decimal points and use them as the colon in the digital clock, e.g. “3:00″.

My experience with the big 7-segment displays has been overwhelmingly positive. They were easy to assemble, all the soldering instructions were clear, and they were easily daisy-chained together. Also, they’re built to plug right into an Arduino (the grey ribbon cable in the picture above)! It’s still to be seen if they are bright enough to be seen inside the combat arena, especially given all the bright lights that are already inside.

Ideally, the giant displays will be put inside the arena for the crowd to be able to see how much time is left in each fight. How we’ll prevent them from getting trashed by some robot is yet to be determined. At the moment they are protected by wishful thinking, hopes, dreams, and rainbows. Unfortunately robots like Last Rites scoff at such things.

I’m also trying to build clocks for each team, so that the robot driver can do a quick glance and see how much time is remaining. I’m attempting to get these 2.3″ 7-segment displays to work, but they are being stubborn and refuse to light up. My problem is probably just a limitation in how much current can be drawn from the microcontroller board.

Speaking of which, the good folks at Farnell let us try out Digilent’s ChipKIT Uno32. Their  website has a ton of excellent electronic products available in the US and beyond.

The above picture is a test to see if my shift register was working as intended, which will be daisy-chained to two more shift registers (and their associated 7-segment displays).

You may notice that the ChipKIT Uno32 (seen in red above) looks strikingly similar to your standard Arduino, well that’s with good reason as it’s built with Arduino compatibility in mind! The Uno32 is powered by a 32-bit MIPS processor, has a large number of I/O ports, 5 external interrupts (versus 2 on an Arduino), is compatible with Arduino shields, and can be programmed using an environment based off the Arduino IDE. My only complaint about the board is that it’s advertised as being fully compatible with Arduino code, and I found that to be only mostly true. When attempting to get the push-buttons to work, I was using the AttachInterrupt() function when using an Arduino, however the AttachInterrupt()  function was not yet supported by their IDE. On the plus side, that was my only gripe with the board, and their team is continually updating their IDE to be fully Arduino compatible.

Additionally (not shown in the pictures), there will be some relays tossed in there so when the timer hits zero, something glorious will happen.

Airhorns, glitter, leprechauns and unicorns. However, due to budget constraints, airhorns are the most likely out of the bunch.

Thanks again to Evil Mad Science, as well as Farnell and their US team!

Submitted with minimal comment:

We <3 Robot Japan so flippin’ hard, we are eager for their presence at RoboGames 2012!

Thanks Robots Dreams!

The Robotics Society of America, proud 501(c)3 nonprofit and co-promoter for RoboGames, has been picked to be in the running for $25k as part of the Pepsi Refresh project!

We Need Your Help! Vote for us to get $25,000 bucks so that we can get underserved kids building robots, and have them compete at RoboGames!

We have until the end of the month to end up in the Top 15 slots!

If we get funded, we’ll have the ability to get a whole slew of robot kits for a whole slew of kids that would otherwise not have them, or the teaching time to learn science math and engineering through robots!

You can sign in to the site with FaceBook, or create an account there; you can text, tweet, reblog it, sing it from the mountain tops, whatever helps us get the word out!

You can vote for us EVERY SINGLE DAY until the end of the month! Vote early, vote often, tell your friends, bribe your enemies!

RoboGames, unlike some other youth robotics programs we might mention, never charges for our Under 18 youth league! We don’t restrict by ability, equipment, or anything else, and we provide valuable experience and international exposure to all our competitors!

We have been doing this for nine years on a largely all-volunteer basis, but just imagine what we, who have done so much for so many with so little, could do if we had some actual cash to grease the skids!

We’ll keep you updated as the month goes on, currently we’re in 48th place!

Thanks very much, we’re all crossing our fingers! Get out there and vote for us! (please. Please.)

The latest issues of Robot is out! Eveyrone go snag a copy at one of your fine local publications depots.

We make special note of this, because while Robot is indeed a fine, fine publication, Our Man In Japan Lem Fugitt has a really nice cover article about a neat sounding little event called RoboGames which apparently happened in the Silicon Valley this past April.

We love Lem, because not only does he have an exhaustively informative fire hose of robot information over on his blog (which blog we here would very much like to be when we grow up), but he also is a dandy fine person and we always look forward to plying him with alcohol and questionable conduct when he is here on his annual US spring sojourn.

Plus he’s got awesome footage of me giving Team RioBots what for after an incident in the arena (Naughty Brazilians!).

We also welcome with open arms the possibility that more of our friends from Robot Japan and the greater Tokyo Area will come show the US competitors how it’s done for RoboGames 2012!

So go out and get a Robot right now and support printed matter.

This this this this this this THIS.

[Goth Robot Dance Of Your Choice Goes Here]

[Thanks Josh.0 for the best rendition of the robot I have ever seen in my life, ever.]

From the always superlative Robots-Dreams comes a great English-language summary of this month’s RoboCon Magazine, for we pathetic non-Japanese speaking English speakers.

Among the juicy delights afforded us by the always well-done RoboCon robotics journal is a fab, huge article covering RoboGames 2011, at which we were very honored to have an enthusiastic contingent of competitors from Robot Japan.

Robot Japan is a collection of robotics enthusiasts that holds meetings, maintain a blog, and serves as a relatively informal organizing body for robotics events around Japan.

We were excited that several members were planning on attending RoboGames 2011, and that was even before a little thing like one of the biggest earthquakes in recorded history, and a horrendous, devastating tsunami occurred right in their back yard.

To recap: DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKE AND TSUNAMI, and they made it to the competition anyway.

We’ve had competitors from other countries (including the USA) whinge about having to get up before ten and how the hotel sheets weren’t the right thread count, so needless to say, we were impressed.

After everything they had been through and after overcoming some technical glitches, we were extremely pleased to see this:

It’s obvious that the Japan contingent had a wonderful time, made lots of new friends, and is committed to participating in strength next Spring at RoboGames 2012.

Along with articles on Taylor Veltrop‘s awesome Kinect/ROS/Wii Frankensteinian humanoid action, there’s loads more about Robot Japan 1st and all the other great things which makes RoboCon reason enough in itself for us over her to run out and learn Japanese posthaste.

[Thanks a millions, Lem!]

As promised, we have news on the RoboGames 2011 TV special!
The show premieres on May 30th, 9PM on the SCIENCE channel!

Discovery Press has also published an excellent article going over the television show – Read Me!

Lastly, the awesome commercial, in all its robotty splendor:

(Thank you Robot Marketplace for the Youtube vid)

-The Intern

The sound of hundreds of pounds of metal slamming into each other, and the smell of burning rubber and fried electronics finally fades.
It’s been three weeks since the annual International RoboGames took place, and I think my hearing is finally back.

This year’s annual RoboGames was a huge success, and we’d like to thank everyone for coming down to the San Mateo Event Center and hope to see you again in October for The ComBots Cup!

For those not familiar, RoboGames is the world’s largest robotics competition! The 3-day extravaganza featured 239 teams from 17 countries competing in 59 separate events; including soccer, hockey, sumo, fire-fighting, kung-fu, and the ever popular (and dangerous) combat robots!

I’d like to send out a special thanks to the crazy Brazilian teams that showed up, as well as the Japanese teams that made the long trek out despite the obvious complications at home.

As an added bonus we were joined by Grant Imahara (of Mythbusters fame) and The Science Channel. They were filming a TV special that is set to air on Memorial Day Weekend, more news as we get it!

For those that want to check out what they missed (or relive what they saw), YouTube is overflowing with RoboGames videos:

Make sure to check out the combat, as well as humanoid events!

(Credit to Lem Fugitt and robots-dreams.com for the footage)

Lastly, a quick thank-you to our sponsors:

Google, Jameco, TechShop, The Robot MarketPlace, Neato Robotics, Willow Garage, Servo Magazine, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, Innovati, Robots-Dreams and FingerTech Robotics!

Check out more RoboGames coverage!
Jameco RoboGames Update
Wired RoboGames Coverage
IEEE – Humanoids at RoboGames
nerdsinbabeland.com

-The Intern

The superlative Jeri Ellsworth brings us this touching take of how a contest featuring everyone’s favorite integrated circuit chip 555 Contest (currently running and sponsored, in part, by RoboGames, whee!) came to be.

I am sure all of our faithful readers (all six of you) out there will jump at the chance to win bragging rights and fabulous prizes by entering the contest! Go go go!

Hey all you Mechwarriors kung fu fighters and RoboOne aspirants, here’s a nice hack that will definitely make you the belle of the competition in April

Although if Taylor Veltrop, humanoid roboticist and Kinect hacker extraordinaire, shows up to RoboGames, you guys are going to have some scrambling to do:

The robot is based on the ever-popular KHR-1 humanoid platform, and tweaked with ROS and the electronics have been replaced with a RoBoard.

[PSSST- Register for RoboGames HERE!]

Kal Spelletich, Robot Artist extraordinaire, does things with machines that should be marginally illegal, and probably are. He is having a show this Saturday in San Francisco, which you should go to if you are geographically situated.

The BBC has a small piece on Polar Bears whaling on remote-controlled robotic cameras designed to unobtrusively chart the bears in their natural habitat in Svalbard, Norway. This splendid piece of observation and film-making yielded some really gorgeous footage of polar bears being polar bears*, which includes some spectacular ingenuity in the field of tearing the living hell out of the electronics.

The cameras used for a documentary on polar bears were designed to be as unobtrusive and resilient as possible.

Polar Bear: Spy on The Ice used hi-tech “spy cams” to get as close as possible to the bears during summer in the Arctic islands of Svalbard.

But while they were built to withstand temperatures as low as -40C, in the end most could not cope with the curiosity displayed by their subjects.

The producer must have wept, then wet him/herself at the prospect of what was in the camera afterwards.

Thanks Paul Saffo!

*OMG SO FLUUUFFYYYY!!

HOLY MOLY(bdenum), Robo Bat Friends! Let me tell you about this new iPhone iPad iPod app for $2.99 that-
And I quote:

“Description

No 1 Staff Favorite in Japan!
LOVEBOTS by KIT ROBOT has arrived! The NEW Digital Robot Assembly Kit and Robot Avatar Creator, SUITABLE FOR ALL AGES.

Placing creative power in your hands! Join the loveBot
Presented by Award Winning WhiteWall Studios.

Forget the Golden Plastic Age of model kits, limiting the range of parts to one model and WELCOME to the Golden Digital Age.

Now Introducing LOVEBOTS, where you can create over 1.3 MILLION combinations of Robots out of the box!”

Check out the gallery of ideas on boingboing as there are lots of delicious and eye popping pictures to ponder while you get your iTunes on speed dial.

I leave you now with one final quote:
“We are asking LoveBot fans to send us their creations, as we plan to release The Art of LoveBots app book. “

The Australian contingent of the Robot Fighting League recently had an event Down Under, and forwarded us videos to prove it.

In their words: “All our fights were broadcast live on the internet, but we forgot to let you guys know. Sorry.”

They will be dealt with summarily. Before that, here are some nice boomysmashy videos to get your mid-whatever-season-it-is-in-your-hemisphere blues all fired up and filled with robotty goodness:

See also an MP4 here with BOTCAM! Action (takes a bit to load) and another one here (also takes a bit to load that features BOTCAM! Action from an opposing angle.

In the first video there is what he Aussie call a LiPoly Fire. I would just like to say (omgomgomg I actually get to say this omg whee):

THAT’S not a LiPoly fire.

THIS is a Lipoly Fire!:

The action begins about 40 seconds in.

Thanks Aussie RFL participant Kkeerroo and Matt Maxham of Team Plumb Crazy for the ComBots Cup V video

So the other day, I got myself a Skype account and hunkered down in the living bunker of Uncanny Valley Estates (where we live and work and poke the robots with sticks) and spent an hour shooting the shit with a few interesting and intelligent people about The Future for the TWiT Fourcast podcast. It was fun.

This video is the result: