VI Shots

This video is the first in a series of videos I will be releasing over the next couple of months related to my trip to Atlanta for the 2008 FIRST Robotic Championship. I took a lot of video there and I don’t want it to sit on my hard drive. Instead, I want to make sure the enthusiasm, excitement and craziness of the competition is shown so that new mentors can be motivated to help the next generation of engineers and scientists waiting in the wings.

In this video from RoboBusiness 2008, we interview Steven from Powercast who shows off some cool wireless power technology.

From the Powercast website:

Founded in 2003, Powercast developed a receiver module with breakthrough efficiency levels. Coupled with a transmitter that sends RF energy using algorithms developed by Powercast, the Powercast Wireless Power Platform™ was born. While the concept of sending power “through the air” has been discussed for more than 100 years, Powercast is the first company to make it commercially viable. Powercast is now leading the cross-industry initiative to bring wireless power to a hundreds of low power devices.

A video from NIWeek 2008. Benjamin Cook really had fun building this electric guitar effects system based around NI hardware and LabVIEW.

This is a wireless audio processing project. A 550 MHz transmitter transmits FM modulated data to a 5600 down converter. It down converts the data to 25MHz. That gets sent to a 5640R IF-RIO card. The IF-RIO card has an FPGA. That’s where all the demodulation and audio processing happens which then gets sent out the sound card. You get very low latency audio response.

As you know, here at VI Shots we love video. So I’m excited that one of our favorite blogs has started producing a new series of videos focusing on LabVIEW Object-Oriented programming. I’ve embedded the first video above.

Tomi’s done a great job on the graphics, and he cuts from wide to close up shots nicely. It takes a lot of work to produce decent video and Tomi’s efforts show in the resulting output. The audio needs some improvement. I think this can easily be solved by bringing the mic in closer or switching to a lavalier. I’m looking forward to more episodes.

Well, this video could use some editing but here it is. A totally useless application demonstrating the vision capabilities of LabVIEW. Watch a camera mounted on an X-Y motion platform tracking the movements of a goldfish in a fish tank.

I just downloaded the free Spore creature creator. I created my first creature, took some photos of it and even uploaded a video to Youtube directly from the software. All of the above in just half an hour of playing with it. It’s pretty slick.

I gotta hand it to the creators for coming up with imaginative names for all the varied body parts available in the game. Names such as: Pincernaut, Crockisser, Terrorpin, Gobsterclaw and Nubknuckle. Just to name a few. The physics of the creations is pretty realistic. If you have kids, put them in front of this and watch them learn.

Describes the Mars Rover Exhibit Project made by students in the EPICS program at Purdue University and powered by LabVIEW.

I always do what Google tells me to do. A few weeks ago my Google reader suggested that I should follow the robotgrrl blog RSS feed. So I did. This blog is about robotics from a Montreal, Canada High School girls point of view. Erin loves robots. So much so that she applied to the Stanford University EPGY summer program – Artificial Intelligence. After she got accepted, she announced that funding for her tuition would come from the sale of styrobots. These are little hand made robots that combine vibrobot “technology”, painted Styrofoam cups and a cute name. Erin is selling these on Etsy. Erin is heading for the final stretch deadline to collect $1200 before June 13th. You can help. Go to her site and donate to a good cause. Not sure if Erin will make any more Styrobots for her Etsy shop but keep checking there. After the recent exposure she got on dvice, I don’t think she will be able to keep up with demand. Watch the video to see what a Styrobot looks like.

The big announcement this year at the FIRST robotics finals in Atlanta was the new robot controller from National Instruments. This new controller called cRIO runs a real-time OS and can be programmed using LabVIEW. The power of this new technology will open the door for new and more interesting challenges for future FIRST competitions.One area that is underdeveloped in the FRC category of the competition is the autonomous mode. This is in contrast to FLL which is mostly autonomous. Hopefully we will see some interesting games ahead.

In this video VI Shots interviews Ray Almgren who leads the worldwide academic relations program for National Instruments. We also interview several mentors and students to get their feedback on this change in direction for next years competition. Teams 2023, 1739, 47, 107 and 2053 are featured.

We were the first to blog about Slashbot back in March. Now, Slashbot is Internet famous after it was featured on Engadget. It now has 177K+ hits on Youtube. A record for any video featuring LabVIEW or NI technology. I like the fact that it uses solenoids to hit the guitar buttons. This means it could possibly be retrofitted to attach to a humanoid robot that holds the guitar. That would look kinda neat. I contacted Michael Voth and it seems that this demo will be making an appearance at NIWeek 2008. I promise to bring back a video interview of this cool project.