A Modicum of Fun

While I despise switching between daylight savings time and standard time, the switch does bring new timing to regular routines that can suprise you!

For many years https://jpieper.com was a home for my personal writings and projects.

Blinking lights is something that I guess I’ve been enamored with for a while - see 2001 dorm (with awesome work from Brad on visualizations), 2007 bike, and 2015 trumpet.

If this space is looking stale, that’s because it is!

For many years now on and off I’ve played in the programming contest associated with the International Conference on Function Programming.

Earlier in April we took Super Mega Microbot out to California to compete in Mech Warfare during Robogames 2016.

Well, that took longer than I expected!

I have some incremental progress to report on various parts of Super Mega Microbot.

We just concluded the first ever Boston Mech Warfare Expo this weekend, held at Jaybridge Robotics in Cambridge.

A whole lot of laser cut parts and printed boards just arrived for the scoring system for Super Mega Microbot.

In our efforts to reduce weight and complexity for Savage Solder, over the Christmas holiday and first couple of months of 2015 we designed a new computer system based on the Odroid U3 instead of the Mini-ITX form factor PC we had used previously.

Savage Solder competed in the Robomagellan event in the newly restored and most impressive Robogames 2015 this past weekend.

As part of preparing Savage Solder for events this spring, I’ve been overhauling the computer and sensing platform to have higher reliability and lower weight.

To act as a forcing function in our development of Super Mega Microbot, we put together a Mech Warfare style qualification video, showing it driving around for more than 5 minutes shooting at some targets.

legtool is the library and graphical application I’ve developed for inverse kinematics and gait generation to use with Super Mega Microbot.

Yesterday I pushed the release of the newest version of pygazebo to github, 3.0.0-2014.1.

AVC 2014 has come and gone!

This video shows some gaits for our Mech Warfare entrant, tentatively named “Super Mega Microbot”.

A few pictures from the in-progress mech build… Aluminum chassis plates Lower chassis with some boards populated Mockup assembly of chassis minus turret and computer

One of the improvements we made for this year’s Savage Solder entry into the Sparkfun AVC (and maybe other competitions, I’m looking at you Vecna Robot Race), is an updated baseboard.