I’ve put together pictures of the CAN bus “sniffer” project I made recently. Here is a picture of the “sniffer” hardware implementation, connected to another project that reads data from a GPS module (that small square thing in the lower right corner of the photo).

The basic idea is that the GPS interface board (the green board at the bottom of the picture) is reading data from the GPS module, doing some processing of the data, then forwarding latitude and longitude over the CAN bus to anyone who wants to listen. Someday I’m planning to implement a robot that will use that data to help navigate.

My robotics library contains the “sniffer” demo program (it uses the same hardware as the can_mcp2515 demo) as well as the code I wrote to parse the GPGGA-style sentences from a GPS module like this one.

It’s that time of year again! The annual Robothon is coming September 21-23 at Seattle Center.

This event is always a lot of fun. If you aren’t familiar with it, check out some of my pictures from 2005 and 2006. There is always fun things to see and of course some of the robots are really amazing.

I’ll be taking a couple of minisumos (The Thin Man and Velox) with me this year, but I haven’t had time to work on any other projects. I had hoped to have a micromouse robot ready but I had to give up that project due to lack of time (other things seems to always interfere). However I’m sure I’ll be busy as there are plenty of events to watch even if I don’t have a robot for it.

Check out the Robothon site for details and hope to see you there!

Eileen’s co-worker pointed out this hilarious little song by the New Zealand comedy duo Flight of the Conchords about the upcoming (in the distant past) robot rebellion.

It made me think of the book How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion by Daniel H. Wilson. He gave a talk at Google that was sorta funny, also available on YouTube.

Seems there is a fresh round of geek comedy about robots going around.

I took a couple of hours today to photograph and document two old minisumo projects: Screech and Velox. You can see the photos here and here.

Screech was my very first minisumo and I attempted to make one without starting with a kit. It was moderately successful (good enough to win first place in Traditional Minisumo at Robothon 2003) but quickly lost any competitive edge against more advanced robots. Today it sits on a shelf and will eventually be recycled into a new robot.

The picture to the left is Velox as it is today. This isn’t what Velox looked like originally. I had purchased a Mark III kit and built it pretty much as-is except for using a different controller.

Velox continues to be a pretty good robot though. Recently it placed third in Advanced Minisumo at the WCRG. Over the last few years I’ve made many modifications to try to be more competitive. I didn’t keep a good photographic record, unfortunately, and I don’t even recall all the changes that were made. I do recall that at one time I had mounted 4 AA batteries above the controller board though. It had a total of 8 AA batteries and was pretty powerful at the time (circa 2003).

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

I wasn’t able to get to Portland for this year’s PDXBot event as we had previous plans to be up to the Okanagan region that same weekend. But my friend Dave Hylands offered to take a couple of my robots with him and run them for me. So I packed up The Thin Man and AL the microsumo, gave Dave a few instructions and advice about behaviors and such.

I was very happy with the results: The Thin Man placed first in the Advanced Minisumo category. Dave’s cool minisumo Stinger placed second, and Daryl Sandberg’s Slik placed third. AL placed third in the Microsumo category. You can see the full results here and here.

Dave was gracious enough to provide some video footage from the event. I picked out two of the battles between two of Dave’s robots and The Thin Man for your viewing pleasure (each is 2.7 MB).

The Thin Man vs. Maurader

The Thin Man vs. Stinger

Both videos are a lot of fun to watch and highlight that winning is sometimes just a bit of luck. In both videos it is very clear that The Thin Man is good at tossing an opponent out of the ring but detecting the opponent is a bit of hit-or-miss. I really think both matches could have easily turned out quite differently. But I’m not one to complain at this point.