Robot Tracking and Python at the Hardware Meetup

Another good hardware meetup. Brian was showing off a properly working robot tracking solution, which means that Hull Pixelbot Robot Rugby is getting closer…

StarbeamRainbowlabs was showing off a Raspberry Pi cluster in the making. Love the colours.

Karen had brought along some devices that she wanted to play with, including the one above. But what does it do?

Finally, Ben and myself did a bit of Micro Python. Each time we have a Hardware Meetup I’m producing a little briefing document about the subject. You can find these documents here.

Connected Humber Hardware Meetup

Lots of activity tonight at the Connected Humber Hardware Meetup including circuit building, Raspberry Pi development and robot tracking (that’s the big camera rig at the back of the picture).

We also had lots of computer chat, which I love. As usual I left with a bunch of ideas for things to try out.

This is the inside of my LED cube with two panels joined together. I’ve printed the corners that link them. Now I just need some more corners and panels.

This is the two faces in action. Next step is to start writing my own programs rather than using the demo code.

This is Brian’s robot tracking software. He is using an overhead camera to track robot location using a specially printed robot hat. It’s getting quite good.

This is one of the robots being tracked. You can see the dot pattern on the top that the software is looking for. The square around the pattern is to stop the other leds on the robot from interfering with the image.

If you want to come to our next meetup in 2 weeks, when we will be taking a look at super-cheap Python powered devices, then you can sign up here.

And remember that we have a Facebook group for the hardware meetups too. You can join in the conversation here.

Hardware Group Meetup - Frekvens and LED Cubes

I thought it might be fun to add some themes to Hardware Group meetups. The next meetup, on Thursday 20th of Feb, will be about Ikea Frekvens hardware, among other things. I’ll bring along my speaker, so folks can get an idea of how good it sounds.

I’ll also be bringing along my LED cube work in progress. I’m working on making a cube out of 64x64 led panels. The idea is to have a Raspberry Pi 4 inside, along with a fairly muscular battery, so that the device can be totally mobile, just a cube that lights up. I’ve got my panels, so now I’m printing out all the support pieces from this amazing design. I’ll be bringing my work in progress along to show off.

The event is free for anyone who fancies coming along. You can get tickets here.

Hardware Group Meetup

On the way into the Hardware Meetup at c4di tonight I sprinted off to the waterfront, leaving Brian wondering what I was up to. There was a great big boat going down the estuary and I wanted to grab some pictures. Of course, but the time I got the big camera out and pointing in the right direction the boat had moved downstream a bit, but I still rather like the resulting shot.

We had some really good discussion about hardware and whatnot and Brian showed me how to get started making my own PCBs. The next meetup will be on the 20th of February and I’ll be publishing details soon.

Robot Tracking at the Hardware Meetup

Tonight we did some robot tracking at the hardware meetup. This is all part of the “Robot Rugby” thing we are working on. Brian and I set up our cameras and got to work. Brian is reading QR codes from the top of the robot, I’m trying to find out if I can get position and orientation from two lit pixels on top of the robot.

We set up the supports (with copious duct tape) and started playing. Tests seem to indicate that I should be able to detect only the pixels on the robot by turning down the gain on the camera so that only very bright lights show up. Lots of work to do here, but we are making progress.

Making QR codes from Python

I’m trying to create the game of robot rugby. As you do. I’ve no idea how the game mechanic will work. My plan is to rope in some folks at the Hardware Meetup to try and work out the rules.

Anyhoo, one of the things that we are working on is some way of tracking the robots around the playfield so that each robot player can know where it is. Brian has been working on some code to track things by means of QR codes and so I said I’d make some “rugby hats” for the robots with QR codes printed on them. So I needed to get and print some QR codes.

It turns out that making QR codes from a Python program is really, really easy. I found this library which works a treat.

import qrcode
for i in range(1,25):
    qr = qrcode.QRCode(
    version=1,
    error_correction=qrcode.constants.ERROR_CORRECT_L,
    box_size=5,
    border=4,
    )
    text="Robot"+str(i)
    qr.add_data(text)
    qr.make()
    img = qr.make_image(fill_color="black", back_color="white")
    filename = text+".png"
    img.save(filename)

This will make 24 labels that will just fill an A4 page in a word document. I printed them out onto label paper and stuck them on some pixel shades that I’d printed.

Really good hardware meetup at c4di

This evening we had a most excellent hardware meetup at c4di. We had a new member turn up and say Hi, Adam was there too and we had some great discussion about moving forward with Air Quality and lots of other stuff. Everyone who turned looked like they’d just come from standing under a waterfall, which they had.

I really must start taking pictures of these gatherings, but I’m usually so busy chatting that I forget to. Which means you’ll have to put up with one of my vaguely artistic efforts at the top of this post.

The next Hardware Meetup is on the 14th November at 6:00 pm at c4di. Let’s hope for better weather.

Server Discussions at c4di

We had a quiet, but useful, hardware meetup today at c4di. Although most of the talk was of servers and software.

We’re in the process of migrating our services onto a shiny new Azure platform (if virtual machines can ever be regarded as shiny). As of today we’ve got the bulk of the work done. This means that you can go to our map and see something useful. We made some changes to the configuration live at the meeting which was great fun. I also insisted that we turn off the server and then turn it back on again, so that we could make sure that there are no manually started services that we need that would cause things to break if we ever had a reset. I’m pleased to be able to report that the server passed with flying colours.

Next we have to move our web sites and a couple of other services and then we’ll back in business. Huge thanks to everyone, particularly Starbeamrainbowlabs and Brian, for making the move.

Starbeamrainbowlabs has written some neat blog posts on the migration process that you can read here.

Air Quality Hardware Meetup

We had a splendid hardware meetup today. A whole bunch of new people turned up, including Dave White, Hull City Council Air Quality Officer. We wanted to discuss sensor design, data visualisation and a bunch of other things. So we did. It was great. Lots of plans made which I really look forward to seeing lead somewhere.

At the time I promised to put up a bunch of links to things that folks might find interesting. I think these are the ones, please feel free to let me know if there is anything missing.

• You can find out about Connected Humber here.

• You can join in the conversation about Connected Humber, Air Quality or anything else you fancy chatting about here.

• You can read my amazing blog here. Oh, you are doing. Thanks for that.