Robotics Club
Every Tuesday at 7pm in Room 329, UCD Engineering and Materials Science Building
Robotics Club is a club which focuses mainly on learning new aspects of engineering, programming and robotics. It runs weekly as part of ElecSoc and is fully run by students. Each week we are solving problems and are making progress on currently active projects.
Every member of UCD ElecSoc is welcome to come and join us at any point and either work on some of the currently active projects or else start a new project. Anyone is welcome to come along and try out some of our kit, no matter if it’s for an assignment, eagerness to learn and experiment or just fun.
No matter what your skill set is, there will be a project for you and we’re all ears if you have your own ideas for something we should try out.
It is a great place to meet new people and make new friends. We are a friendly inviting group and are always looking for new members who share our passion for engineering, programming and robotics. We encourage our members to help each other and learn together. It doesn’t matter what level of skill or how much knowledge you have, all are welcome to join.
Robotics Club 2020
In compliance with public health guidelines, all of this semester’s Robotics projects are being held virtually on discord. To take part, simply join our server here: https://discord.gg/NGymkv6
Intro to Android App Development – Aness K
Mondays at 6pm (starting 28/09)
This Robotics Club course is a relaxed introduction to Android App Development in Java. It comprises of live online weekly sessions where members will learn to develop simple android projects in a fun and laid-back atmosphere. The course will begin with the basics and assumes little to no programming experience, although some form of prior programming knowledge would be useful. By the end of the course, you should be able to code simple android apps and understand the basics of Java and object oriented programming.
Interview Programming Questions – Jack Nugent
Tuesdays at 6pm (starting 29/09)
By looking at common questions asked by interviewers to review a programmers knowledge, you can prepare and practice your programming style.
If you are new to programming or a little rusty, these questions should help you to familiarise and learn some of the more tricky parts of programs.
I plan to use a few languages that you may be interested in getting started on, such as C and C++, Python and Matlab.
I plan to share and talk over the questions in live Discord voice channels and upload my attempts in recorded shorts to Elecsoc’s youtube.
CAD & 3D Printing
More information coming soon.
Past Projects
The aim of this project is to first of all build a chess board whereby the positions of the chess pieces can be controlled and manipulated remotely, most likely using electromagnets. This can be done with a similar system as will need to be developed for the 3D printer project, as both require precise movement of a part in the xy plan. Once we have a system completed that can move chess pieces around we plan on interfacing with a computer that will run a chess AI so a human player can play against the computer in real time with physical pieces. Examples of this type of project have been done before such as this one:
This year we are putting extra effort to allow our members access to 3D printing. So it is only suitable that we take this to the next level. With all the developments and innovations that are currently taking place in the 3D printing space we decided we want to make our mark by designing and building our own printer from scratch. With this project we are free to design a printer that will suit our needs, meet our own specifications and overcome some of the issues we experience with the technology we currently have. There are plenty of printer designs out there that we can take inspiration from, anything form delta style printers to prusa designs to the fabricator mini and everything in between.

Over the course of last semester the club 3D printed a robotic arm. We got the design from the InMoov open source project and printed it using the clubs own 3D printer. It is now assembled and ready for programming. Our initial plan for the hand is to get it to play rock paper scissors. Once this is working we can work on getting it to run more complex algorithms such as object tracking or recognition using a camera.
Example Code
ExaDownload Arduino IDE Software
Arduino Workshop Examples:
Instructions
Spaceship
Lovemeter
Colour Mixing Lamp
Moodcue
Light There Min
Keyboard
Sumobot Code
Git Hub Repository
Tutorial Documents
Sensor Examples
All of the example code below will work with the Arduino boards provided in the lab.
auto_flash
flame_sensor
hall_sensor
humidity_sensor
joystick
knock_sensor
line_sensor
photo_interrupter
tilt_sensor
vibration_sensor
voice_sensor