Autonomous Vehicle Hackerspace Championship preparations @ Hackeriet
The mission is to make a competition for the Hackerspace that uses rc-cars or other robots and cool gadgets to perform in a challenge.
The basic rule of the contest is that your vehicle has to be able to go from the start line of the planned course to the finish line all by itself. No human intervention is allowed.
You can read more about the competition here.
To kickstart this event we want members to participate in 3 sessions / workgroups that also gives them a insight of how to make circuit boards from the bottom up. The board we are going to make will be the one you could use for your own electric rc-car of random sort. All it needs to work is power, and 1 ESC motor controller, and an rc servo.
We would ask from you at the second session to pay a small fee to be a part of the etching session as you will get your own circuitboard to work with, and the necessary components. As we would need to know how many components and circuitboards and chemicals to by for the second session you will need to sign up for that session.
The first session is free and everyone can join.
Three sessions
The plan so far (work in progress, feel free to suggest things) is to organise 3 sessions:
Design
Design a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) specifically made for UGV. Needs to support:
- Touch sensors
- Ultrasound ping sensors
- IR range sensors
- Line following sensors
- possible connection for GPS for the people that wants to invest in that
- ... more?
In this session we will go through the design process of a working circuitboard with its intended use as a motherboard for a UGV or unmanned remote controlled electric car. The point with this session is to let users get to know drawing a PCB in Eagle CAD software. We walk through designing a schematic and further on laying out a sketch of the circuitboard on a projector in a group. At the end we will calculate the estimated component cost for each member when we by everything as a group and set a price for each member to pay at the next session for those that want to be involved.
Etching
We'll etch the circuitboards we designed in the previous session and solder on the components necessary for getting the rc car to run autonomously.
This is a perfect time to join in on if you are curious about making/etching your own circuitboards. Every participant will get their own finished PCB for their RC car to use in the Autonomous vehicle championship.
You will need to pay for the components for your board at this stage. These can be bought from Hackeriet, at special hackerspace prices or you can bring your own. To get your own PCB to work with you will need some cash. We will calculate the amount every member will need to pay for his/her board with components at the end of the first session with the PCB design tutorial.
Assembly & Programming
We will connect the boards to the rc cars and start the programming necessary for basic obstacle avoidance and maybe line following and gps waypoint navigation.
At the end of this session most people should have a working rc car driving away from everything surrounding it!
Links and videos
Help starting with:
Abbreviations / glossary
- ARC - Autonomous Radio Controlled
- CAD - Computer-Aided Design
- ESC -
- GPS - Global Positioning System
- IR - Infra-Red
- PCB - Printed Circuit Board
- RC - Radio Controlled
- UGV - Unnmanned Ground Vehicle
Showing changes from previous revision. Removed | Added