Author Archives: Alan

About Alan

I've spent some time working in the games industry, and now I'm currently coming to the end of a PhD in Robotics at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Dawn Robotics is an attempt at supporting myself doing something I love, and also a platform that I can hopefully use to turn my various ideas for robots, and robotic parts, into useful products.

Closing Down Dawn Robotics

So, unfortunately, as you can tell from the title of the post, I’ve decided to close down Dawn Robotics. This decision has been a long time coming, but basically, over the last couple of months, I’ve come to the realisation that Dawn Robotics is just not getting to the point where it can provide me with a stable income quickly enough. With a young family to support, and being in a fairly precarious financial situation. I’ve decided to go back to the life of a full-time computer programmer, which is not a bad one. :)

People who know Dawn Robotics well may be wondering about the grant we got from Jisc back at the start of August, which was intended to help us develop our robot kits further and to produce educational material for robotics. As we’re not going to be able to fulfill those commitments, this grant has been repaid in full. In fact, the need to do this was one of the reasons for making this decision now, rather than letting things drag out.

Now, whilst it’s a bit sad that Dawn Robotics is closing down, the good thing from a ‘cheap stuff’ point of view is the Closing Down Sale! :) So, please head along to our store to grab yourself a bargain. We don’t have many robot kits left, but we do have lots of Arduino Shields, Raspberry Pi Accessories and Adafruit items, all with up to 40% off.

For people who have already bought kits, or items from our store, please rest assured that I’ll continue to provide support for these items, and I’m holding back some stock in case I need to ship out spares or replacement parts. Also, the instructions to build our kits, along with the open source software required to do so, will remain freely available, and all the main parts we used are available from other UK retailers.

Finally, I’d like to say a big thank you to all the customers who have bought stuff from us over the years, and to all the people who have supported us and who have made this experience so much fun.

Happy robot building. :)

Regards

Alan

New Products – We now Stock Adafruit!

Over the last month, we’ve been adding some new products to our store, and we’re pleased to announce that we now stock a range of Adafruit products.

Adafruit's Servo Controller

Adafruit’s Servo Controller

At the moment these mainly consist of items to make your robot flashy, along with a great servo controller board, and a number of small items that we’ve found useful when building, and connecting sensors to our robots. However, we’ll hopefully be expanding the range of Adafruit items we stock in the future, so for now check out the Adafruit section on our website, and please let us know if there’s anything they make that you’d particularly like us to stock.

Seeedstudio 4A Motor Sield

Seeedstudio 4A Motor Sield

Aside from that, we also have some new products from Seeedstudio. A nifty all in one accelerometer and compass board, and a 4A motor shield for the Arduino for those bigger robotics projects.

Finally, we are also now stocking a few extra Raspberry Pi accessories such as a case and a power supply.

The Official Raspberry Pi 2 Case

The Official Raspberry Pi 2 Case

Update on Jisc Competition Entry

Well, it’s a bit after the fact, due to how busy we’ve been lately, but we’re very pleased to announce that we were lucky enough to win the competition for start up funding that we entered earlier this year! :)

Thank you so much to everyone that voted for us. What this means is that we now have the money to continue developing our robot kit, and producing educational materials to help teachers to teach robot programming in schools. Specifically, we’ll be developing some lesson plans for teaching robotics, and will hopefully be piloting these in a local school or college sometime before the end of the year.

The Jisc funding is delivered as part of a 6 month program, and so we hope to have the final version of the teaching materials ready around the end of January 2016. We’ll try to post a draft version sometime before that though for comments and feedback.

Why so Quiet, and Please Help us to Develop Pi Robot Educational Materials

(If you’ve no time to read then could you please just spend a moment and vote? Thank you!)

Readers who check back on this blog from time to time may have noticed that since the end of November 2014, we’ve been very quiet, and nothing much has been written on this blog (apart from responses to comments). The reason for this is that I (Alan Broun) have been focusing pretty much full time on trying to finish off my PhD at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory and this hasn’t left much time to spend on Dawn Robotics (which is based in the BRL Technology Incubator). My colleague Martin, has been doing a wonderful job, packing orders, building kits and keeping Dawn Robotics going over the last 5 months, but I do most of the development work, so things have been in stasis for a bit.

Now though, I’m almost (almost… so close…) at the point where I can hand in, and although I do need to go off and do some contract programming work for a couple of months to rebuild my finances (Dawn Robotics doesn’t quite pay the bills yet) I am hopeful that Dawn Robotics will soon be back to producing new stuff. :)

This brings me to the point of this blog post. Dawn Robotics has entered into a competition run by an organization called Jisc which is offering up to £20,000 to help startup companies to develop and pilot products for use within schools and universities. But in order to be considered for a prize we need votes from members of the public i.e. you!

The product that we’ve put forward for consideration is our Raspberry Pi Camera Robot. This was originally released last year, targeted at hobbyists, but since then, a number of tech savvy teachers have bought the kit, and started to use it in schools. This makes sense in a lot of ways, as computing and programming are being seen as increasingly important in UK schools, and we feel that robotics is an absolutely fantastic way to engage kids and get them excited about programming. The trouble is, that it’s not as easy to use the robot in schools as it could be. The documentation for the robot is a bit lacking, being spread out over a number of blog posts, and we don’t have any dedicated teaching materials, such as lesson plans to use with the robot.

If we were lucky enough to win funding in the competition, then we’d use the money to change that. We’d use the money to improve the documentation for the robot and to create a range of lesson plans to make it easy for teachers to use the Pi robot in schools. We’d also use some of the money to refine the kit and its software to make it easier to use in schools (currently, connecting multiple robots to a school’s network is tricky). Also, the kit would be piloted in a number of schools to see if there were any other ways that we could improve the kit further. You don’t have to worry that this is all for for the benefit of Dawn Robotics either. The documentation and lesson plans will be released under a Creative Commons Share Alike license, and all of our software for the Pi Robot is open source under the BSD license. So hopefully, enthusiastic teachers will be able to get value out of the lesson plans and software, even if they don’t have one of our robot kits.

Anyway, hopefully you’re convinced. Please check out our pitch video below, and vote for us here. Also, if you could pass the link on and encourage other people to vote, then that would be most awesome. :)

Off to Pitch@Palace

Dawn Robotics is quite a young company (our store is just over a year and a half old now), and as we go through the process of bootstrapping ourselves, we’re lucky to have startup space in the Bristol Robotics Laboratory Technology Incubator.

As part of our involvement with the Technology Incubator, we’re also fortunate enough to have been invited to take part in Pitch@Palace, a platform for young British startups organised by HRH The Duke of York on 5th November at St. James’s Palace.

We’ll be heading along with 2 other tech startups from the BRL incubator, Reach Robotics, and OmniDynamics. This is a great opportunity for us to explain our vision for robotics in education and research to a wider audience (see the slightly rushed video pitch below…).

As part of the Pitch@Palace event, there’s a Pitch@Palace people’s choice award which is given to the company that gets the most votes from the public. So if you could find time to support us and cast a vote for us then that would be very much appreciated. :)

Adding Sensors to the Raspberry Pi Camera Robot Kit

Sensors are a vital part of any robotic project, as they allow a robot to get information about the environment in which it’s operating. Without sensors, a robot has no information about the world around it, and it’s very tough to program intelligent behaviours for the robot.

With sensors your robot can find out about the world

With sensors your robot can find out about the world

Now, you’ve always been able to attach sensors to our Raspberry Pi Camera Robot and the Arduino Mini Driver board we use for motor control, but previously you would have had to modify quite a bit of code in order to get your sensor data out. To fix this, we’ve just released an update to the software for our Raspberry Pi Camera robot which makes things much easier. You can now get a large number of sensors to work simply by connecting them to the Mini Driver. The new Mini Driver firmware repeatedly reads from the attached sensors and sends the readings up to the Pi at a rate of 100 times a second. Once on the Pi, the sensor values can be easily retrieved using the robot web server’s websocket interface. Sensors can also be connected directly to the Pi, with sensor readings returned in the same way.

In this tutorial we show you how to update your robot’s software if needed, how to connect sensors to robot, and then how to read the sensor values using the Python py_websockets_bot library. This will let you write control scripts for your robot that use sensors, and which either run on the Pi, or which run on another computer connected over the network.

Continue reading

Improving the Battery Life of Your Raspberry Pi Robot with a UBEC

A UBEC provides a nice efficient way to power your Pi from batteries

A UBEC provides a nice efficient way to power your Pi from batteries

We recently started selling a USB powerbank which can be used to power the Raspberry Pi robot kit that we sell. Using the powerbank provides great battery life, but we’re still interested in making the robot run well from AA batteries, as this may be the cheaper option if you already have rechargeable batteries and a charger lying around.

Testing battery life

Testing battery life

Therefore, we’re modifying the kit a bit to include a UBEC (Universal Battery Elimination Circuit). This is an efficient switching voltage regulator which takes the load off the linear voltage regulator of the Mini Driver and improves the running time of a robot being powered by AA batteries a lot. This post gives some details about why we’re making this change and also describes a battery testing script that we’ve written to determine what kind of run times can be expected for different methods of powering the Raspberry Pi robot.

Continue reading

Robotics and the Raspberry Pi Model B+

The new Model B+

The new Model B+

So, the big news this week (if you’re a Raspberry Pi fan) is that the Raspberry Pi foundation announced the release of an upgraded version of the Model B Pi, the Model B+. The Raspberry Pi Model B+ is a really nice incremental update of the Model B, and it’s especially good for people wanting to use the Pi in robotic projects. This is because, alongside extra USB ports, it now uses switching voltage regulators which means that it consumes less power (between 0.5W to 1W less) and therefore it will last longer on batteries.

As soon as we got a Model B+ this week, we put it onto one of our Raspberry Pi Camera Robots, and it works great. :) The Model B+ has a different layout and mounting holes than the Model B so we’ve updated the assembly instructions for the robot to show how the Model B+ should be mounted.

We’ve also released a new version of the software for the robot, as the Model B+ needs different drivers for its USB and network ports. This new software has a few bugfixes, and also allows the robot to be driven at slower speeds than before. This new feature may not sound like much, but with the old software, the motors often couldn’t be made to go slower than about 33% speed before they stalled due to friction in the gearboxes. Now by driving the motors in a different way, we get the motors to turn with more torque at lower speeds to overcome this friction. This means that it’s easier to drive the robot whilst looking through the camera, and makes making precise turns easier.

The new SD card image can be downloaded here. Other options for getting the software are discussed here.

New Product – A Power Bank for your Raspberry Pi Robot

One issue that has caught quite a few people out when they build our Raspberry Pi robot kit, is the issue of power. The kit comes with a 6xAA battery holder, but the trouble is, not all AA batteries are the same, which is easy to overlook when you’re grappling with all the other complexities of building a Raspberry Pi robot. :)

We recommend that the robot be powered with good quality, high capacity, rechargeable (NiMh or NiCd) batteries, such as Duracell 2400mAh NiMh . Non-rechargeable (Alkaline) batteries are not recommended as they will struggle to provide enough current to power both the Pi and the motors of the robot.

Good for Robots

Good for robots

Bad for Robots

Bad for robots

Good for Robots

Pretty (and also good for robots)

 

 

 

 

 

As an alternative to AA batteries, we’re now selling the  TeckNet iEP387 USB power bank which can be used to power the entire robot. The power bank is more expensive that the cost of 6 AA rechargeable batteries, but you get the advantage of increased runtime (approx 5 hours compared to 3hrs for the NiMh Duracells), and you don’t have to buy a battery charger.

In this blog post we show you how to use the power bank with the robot. Continue reading

Programming a Raspberry Pi Robot Using Python and OpenCV

Our Raspberry Pi robot has proven to be very popular, as it allows people to easily put together a fun little robot, that they can drive around using a smartphone, tablet or computer, whilst viewing the world with the camera on the robot. However, fun as this is, it’s hard to view this ‘robot’ as being much more than a remote controlled toy. Our personal view has always been that a robot should be autonomous in some way, and that’s why we’ve been working on a programming interface for our robot that will let users of our robots create cool, autonomous behaviours.

Bring your robot to life with Python and OpenCV

Bring your robot to life with Python and OpenCV

The interface is a Python library called py_websockets_bot. The library communicates with the robot over a network interface, controlling it’s movements and also streaming back images from its camera so that they can be processed with the computer vision library OpenCV. Communicating over a network interface means that your scripts can either run on the robot, or they can run on a separate computer. This feature is really useful if you want to use a computer more powerful than the Pi to run advanced AI and computer vision algorithms, or if you want to coordinate the movement of multiple robots.

In this post we show you how to install the interface library, and provide some example programs, that show you how to make the robot move, how to retrieve images from the camera and how to manipulate the images with OpenCV. Continue reading