Announcing Bot Boogaloo 2024
Central Illinois Robotics Club [CIRC] will be hosting their Bot Boogaloo 2024 on Saturday, October 19, 2024. Start time will be 10:00 AM. The end time will be determined by the number of contestants. The location will be at the clubhouse for Izaak Walton Lake, Metamora, IL.
All the events are autonomous unless indicated otherwise. Rules are available for each event via the links below. If the event does not have a link, the rules have not been finalized yet and will be finalized at the competition.
Mail-in entries will be accepted. Live streaming of all events is planned.
If you have questions or suggestions, email president@circpeoria.org.
Registration will be the day of or in advance. If you plan on competing, please let us know at the email above so we can plan appropriately.
After the competitions, we will have a Build Session where people work on their projects as they see fit. The Build Sessions are very informal and fun.
Events planned are:
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Line
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Sumo
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Way Point
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Lawn Mowing
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RC Drone competition
Demonstrations possible:
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ROxX
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Hockey Sumo
- Line Racing
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Wall Maze (simple)
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Inverted Pendulum
February 10, 2024 at 2:54 pm | Announcements, Brawls & Boogaloos | No comment
January Challenge on Sunday 28, 2024
UPDATE: Location changed to Tom’s house in Peoria, IL. If you would like to attend, email president@circpeoria.org.
ORIGINAL: We will be hosting a Challenge on Sunday, January 28th. A Challenge is an informal competition and Build Session all in one. We’ll be competing against each other in an informal manner, working on our bots, and collaborating. One can think of it as a day to build robots and see how well they work. The events we’ll be focusing on this time are Line Follow, Line Maze, Mini Sumo, Cone Stalking, and Drone Racing. Registration is not required. There are no prizes. Anyone is welcome to attend. You can bring a hobby bot or not. Questions are welcomed. We’ll start at 10 AM and stop sometime in the late afternoon. There is no schedule of events. Note: If you have some other bot you want to bring, work on, test, or talk about, then bring it with you. We don’t mind being distracted. If you have questions, contact president@circpeoria.org
SUMMARY: The first Challenge & Build Session went well. We dusted off some of our bots that had not been used in a while, sometimes years, and set to figuring out their needs and capabilities. More than one battery was found to be corroded and all hope those bots are not destroyed. We had some very casual contests and discussed methods to make improvements. In between these Challenges, much building and testing went on with the sharing of expertise.
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Line Follow – Mike, Matt and Bruce were able to get their line followers functioning. Bruce had installed faster motors in his Zumo and was able to produce times that were about half of its previous times. This time, about 12 seconds, was close to Matt’s time with his 3pi. Mike’s self made bot was faster than both by about 5 seconds. We didn’t worry about exact times.
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Line Maze – Matt’s 3pi was able to solve the Line Maze course in a admirable manner, though we did not time it. The struggle for the bot was finding nodes that were not there. We weren’t sure what was causing this, but guessed that it was seeing lines on the course laying under the mat or was thrown off by ripples in the course surface. After removing perceived problems, the bot completed the course.
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Cone Stalker – Matt and Karl were able to get their bots to touch the 3 cones. Both bots were given the way points and moved to the cones following a self derived course that avoided cardboard boxes used as obstacles.
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Robomagellan – Davide brought the club Robomagellan bot, Wheel-E, and shared his understanding and plans for the lovable bot. After having it for only a couple of weeks, his model in Gazebo is nearly ready to test the operating system. Karl was able to spend a lot of time with Davide to explain different details of the Wheel-E operating system.
All in all, the Challenge & Build Session was a success.
January 21, 2024 at 12:58 pm | Announcements, Competitions | No comment
January Meeting Information
Our January meeting will be held on Wednesday the 10th at 5:00 PM in person at River City Labs and online via Google Meet. Visitors are welcome to attend in person or online. If you want to attend online, contact Bruce at president@circpeoria.org to get an invite. Standard meeting format will be followed: 1) Show and Tell; 2) Tech Talk- TBD; 3) Planning and Business followed by socializing. Thank you River City Labs for allowing us to meet in your maker space.
January 5, 2024 at 11:56 am | Monthly Meeting Recaps | No comment
December Meeting Moved to the 20th
Announcement: The December meeting will be held on Wednesday the 20th at 5:00 PM in person at River City Labs [RCL] and online via Google Meet. Visitors are welcome to attend in person or online. If you want to attend online, contact Bruce at president@circpeoria.org to get an invite. Standard meeting format will be followed: 1) Show and Tell; 2) Tech Talk- Drone Firmware Introduction; 3) Planning and Business; 4) Socialize. Directions to RCL available on the Membership page.
December 9, 2023 at 6:35 pm | Monthly Meeting Recaps | No comment
November Monthly Meeting Moved to the 15th.
Announcement: The November meeting will be held on Wednesday the 15th at 5:00 PM in person at RCL and online via Google Meet. Visitors are welcome to attend in person or online. If you want to attend online, contact Bruce at president@circpeoria.org to get an invite. Standard meeting format will be followed: 1) Show and Tell; 2) Tech Talk- TBD; Course; 3) Planning and Business; 4) Socialize.
November 6, 2023 at 4:55 pm | Monthly Meeting Recaps | No comment
October Meeting on 10/11/2023
Announcement: The October meeting will be held on Wednesday the 11th at 5:00 PM in person at RCL and online via Google Meet. Visitors are welcome to attend in person or online. If you want to attend online, contact Bruce at president@circpeoria.org to get an invite. Standard meeting format will be followed: 1) Show and Tell; 2) Tech Talk- Review of Different Techniques of Building a Micromouse Course; 3) Planning and Business; 4) Socialize.
October 5, 2023 at 6:47 pm | Monthly Meeting Recaps | No comment
September Meeting
Announcement: The September meeting will be held on Wednesday the 13th at 5:00 PM in person at RCL and online via Google Meet. Visitors are welcome to attend in person and online. If you want to attend online, contact Bruce at president@circpeoria.org to get an invite. Standard meeting format will be followed: 1) Show and Tell; 2) Tech Talk- Initial Review of Pictorus; 3) Planning and Business; 4) Socialize. Details and directions to River City Labs (RCL) are on our meetings page.
Summary:
Show and Tell:
Bruce – 1) Ubuntu version best, LTS or Latest Version? Mike trusts LTS more because it is Long Term Support. Bruce had installed the latest version on his laptop over the weekend. He started the meeting using the latest version Linux distribution on his laptop to host the online portion of the meeting. Fairly quickly the video and audio kept disconnecting from the Google Meet. He switched to the Windows installation on his laptop to host the meeting online. That eventually crashed too. 2) For the Udemy online drone class, he has ordered copter pieces and watched some of the videos. He’s now waiting on the main package of motors and ESCs to arrive.
Peter – 1) Ordered a Photon 2 microcontroller that was on sale for ~$8 with no specific project in mind. He’s had good luck with a Photon 1 in the past and hopes the Photon 2 works well for his next project. 2) Subscribed to Midjourney for one year. Midjourney is an online tool similar to DALL-E. One difference is that one can upload images of themselves and use them. He’s just starting to learn this service.
Tech Talk: An Introduction to Pictorus Online Visual Programming Tool – Bruce
Shared FAQs and the basics of working with Pictorus programs in simulation mode. The tool is in beta mode, is intuitive, requires users to have some familiarity with controls engineering, is geared towards controlling micro-controllers that are running Linux at this time, and holds a lot of promise. Due to not having a specific cable, he was not able to show the flashing process.
Discussion:
Started discussing the possibility of running a Bot Boogaloo in the Spring of 2024. Nothing was decided and the club will continue the discussion online.
August 29, 2023 at 1:50 pm | Monthly Meeting Recaps, Uncategorized | No comment
October Meeting Will Be Online Only
We will be hosting tonight’s meeting online only, October 12, 2022. There will be no in person meeting at RCL for this meeting. Email the club president if you would like to attend online, and he’ll send you a link. We should be back to having the in-person option for meetings in November.
October 12, 2022 at 3:18 pm | Uncategorized | No comment
Wheel-E Control Panel
In December of 2020, CIRC started building a control panel for Wheel-E, the club Robomagellan robot. Born out of a brainstorming session from Summer 2020, the original rough concept was for a touchscreen/display with a few simple functions, such as a safe shutdown feature for powering off Wheel-E’s raspberry pi. We envisioned the display bolted into Wheel-E’s chassis and communicating with the pi over a serial link such as CAN or SPI.
It might be an understatement to say that the original project concept has evolved since those early days. During Winter ‘21, Matt put together an initial working concept using an old Arduino board he had laying around (Chipkit Max32), plus a new 3.2“ TFT LCD screen with resistive touchscreen from Adafruit. After showing off this initial prototype to club members, the brainstorming really took off. From the original idea of an on-board touchscreen with a few simple functions, we landed on a handheld touchscreen device communicating wirelessly with Wheele over a LoRa datalink. Now we wanted to be able to drive Wheel-E around by virtual joystick via the wireless touchscreen while mapping out GPS routes, then flip over to autonomous mode and let Wheel-E roam.
In May of ’21, we had a nice proof of concept demonstration at a club build session. With the display connected to a laptop via USB, we were able to forward command velocity data from the touchscreen into Wheel-E’s ROS control infrastructure, and drive the ‘bot around Mike’s driveway.
During Summer and Fall of ‘21, the project solidified into a more stable programmable display platform. The old Chipkit Max32 Arduino was replaced with a more modern Adafruit Feather M0 (48MHz ARM CortexM0 CPU), which includes a 900MHz LoRa radio module on-board. Matt was able to spend some time getting a better software architecture in place, to be able to keep up with the flow of brainstorming ideas that inevitably come out of CIRC build sessions. And Tom put his 3D printer through its paces, coming up with several concepts for an ergonomic handheld device that would contain the display and associated electronics/battery.
Current status as of May ‘22, the touchscreen has a functional menu system that is relatively easy to add/extend with new ideas as they come up at build sessions. A GPS unit is installed and displays current position. Support needs to be added to save waypoints for Wheel-E to follow. The biggest outstanding feature at the moment is to demonstrate the LoRa wireless link. Based on some early prototyping, the LoRa functionality on the display is more or less functional. To complete the concept for a working demo, a LoRa module needs to be added on-board Wheel-E with some basic message encoding/decoding and forwarding over Wheel-E’s CAN datalink.
Follow along! We archive source code and track issues for the touchscreen here: https://github.com/CentralIllinoisRoboticsClub/wheele_gui
September 13, 2022 at 9:35 pm | Projects | No comment
July Meeting Postponed Till the 20th
The July club meeting is postponed till Wednesday, July 20th. It will start at 5:00 PM. You can attend the meeting in person at River City Labs (RCL) or online via Google Hangouts. If you wish to attend online and are not a regular attendee, email president@circpeoria.org for an invite. Click on the Meetings tab to get a map to RCL and to learn more about our meetings.
July 12, 2022 at 9:33 pm | Uncategorized | No comment
