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.

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