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!

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

Thanks Robots Dreams!

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.)

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.

[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.]

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!]

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

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

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!

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!]