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 Archive

Robotics Club 2022

Mind controlled robotic arm – Shreyan Banerjee

In this project we will be using our own brain signals coming from an EEG headset to manipulate the fingers of a robotic arm. This has a lot of applications in the prosthetics area for disabled people.

OpenMob – Daniel Álvarez

OpenMob is the most ambitious project in ElecSoc.
We’ll continue this year by putting together all the different modules developed last year for autonomous driving: Path finding, obstacle detection, google maps API integration and GPS module driver. We will aim to have a working first prototype to start making some “real world” tests.

Dance dance Revolution – Joy Njekwe

This project intends to recreate dance dance revolution, a game involving dancing and rhythm that took the 90s by storm.

It will involve the use of force-sensitive resistors and an arduino to create a functioning dance pad whilst also developing a game prototype using python, allowing users to successfully play the game using an emulator like Stepmania.

Arduino based electromyography – Yosra Hashim

Electromyography is a technique that reads electrical signals from muscles.

In this project we will build a circuit to read electrical signals from the bottom-up and use the final result in a number of exciting applications

 

Robotics Club 2021

Robotics club was held for back in person

Mind controlled EEG – Yosra Hashim

In this project we’ll develop a brain-controlled game of pong. This will involve brain-computer interfacing (BCI) where brain signals will be measured and used as our inputs using electroencephalography (EEG). Anyone interested in learning about BCI/EEG (or just getting that hands-on experience with it) is welcome!

OpenMob – Daniel Álvarez

OpenMob will be an open source fleet of smart vehicles that will ride on demand to the user’s location. This year, will focus on the design. We will work on Fusion360 to improve a prototype for a vehicle designed by Dr. Paul Cuffe. We will try to solve some of its issues or completely redesign it. Whatever we want!!! We’ll have a brain storming session and we’ll decide as a team what we want our vehicle to be.

We’ll have a couple of sessions on Fusion360 before actually working on the design, so everyone, no matter your prior experience, can contribute to the project.
In addition to all the awesome fun will have together, we’ll present the design to a competition by the end of this year. It’s always good to earn a bit of glory and reputation for the club and for yourselves.

Heartrate monitor – Ian O’Neill

We will be working on a wearable heart rate monitor. The ultimate goal of this project is to build a wearable heart rate monitor from scratch! Throughout the project we’ll use and learn a good variety of skills, such as prototyping our plans using Arduino, designing an enclosure using CAD and converting our electrical schematics into a neat printed circuit board. Hopefully by the end of the semester we’ll have a working prototype, but what’s most important is that we learn a little more about the design process and have a few laughs along the way.

Rubik’s cube solver – Zac Fetchati

We’re gonna be building a Rubik’s Cube solving robot, to scan in the sides of a Rubik’s Cube, compute the moves necessary and then execute these moves to solve the cube! There will be a wide range of skillsets we will be using, from circuitry of the robot, to CAD work and 3d printing of custom pieces, programming of the solving algorithm, controlling the motors … So it’s a great project for beginners to try out lots of different things but also for more experienced students to put their learnings into practice or also learn somethin new.

We are open to students from any area of study from any stage, I’ll be giving an intro to Arduino and C++ (which we will use to control the motors) and also an intro to Python which will be what we write the solving algorithm in. That being said any higher stage students will also be invaluable and don’t think it will be boring for you guys!

 

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.

3D Printing Introduction

This is one of the long term projects of the club. The club over the last number of years built a quadcopter from scratch and has recently been given a significant hardware upgrade in the form of new 3D printed legs and a GoPro camera mount on the underside that will allow for some great photography. It currently is able to fly under remote control, but our goal for the project is to make it fly autonomously. We plan on using the Intel Galileo board to run in parallel with the flight control board that is already on the quadcopter. We made gains last semester in getting the communication protocol between the two boards working and also on an object tracking algorithm that we could implement on the Galileo in conjunction with a webcam. Next we would need to pull everything together into one program so as the quadcopter would stabilise itself automatically, and take directions from the Galileo based off the input from the webcam.

Our newest project is a tricolour led cube. It was started over the Christmas break and over the course of the last semester we were able to solder together the led matrices. Our goal now is to design the control circuitry for the cube. This task will require designing a PCB board and making it ourselves, due to the sheer complexity of the wiring required. We are going to use an Arduino as the control unit, with many many multiplexers so as to address each led individually, and we have the potential of adding connectivity for WiFi or Bluetooth for an extra layer. This project is ideal for anyone who wants to brush up on their soldering skills or wants to learn how to design and make their own PCBs.
Another new project for the new semester. The club now has access to use a remote control model sail boat. Our plans for the boat are to first get it sailing well under remote control, before developing an autonomous program that will allow it to sail a course without any human guidance.
Last semester the club got its first ever raspberry pi. We plan on using it for various small projects such as connecting it to a 3d printer to allow for wireless printing over the internet. However we are all still new to this platform so if anyone has any other ideas for projects or any experience with the pi you are welcome to come along.

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