Monthly Archive for November, 2008

Dos Pueblos Engineering Academy Team 1717

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.

From Noozhawk:

The Dos Pueblos High School Engineering Academy‘s Robotics Team came in second in its division, losing only to the team that went on to capture the overall title. There were 86 teams in the division from all over the world, including Israel and Canada. There were 340 teams in the competition.

All told, researching, developing and building the robot cost around $13,000, which was covered by and large by the team’s nine local sponsors: Afar Communications, ATK, Flir Systems, Impulse Internet Services, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT), National Security Technologies, Raytheon, Renco and Valley Precision Products.

This year’s Team 1717 members are Alex Adams, Meha Agrawal, Daniel Barrett, Erika Bildsten, Will Campbell, Kevin Cheng, Scott Cook, Kieran Dunne, Sahar El Abbadi, Erika Eskenazi, Omar Gonzalez, Val Harbunou, Ricky Hayes, Jasper Jacobs, Wei Jiang, Trevor Johnson, Robert Kim, Matt Logan, Stephen MacFarlane, Scott Martinis, Joseph McDaniel, Zak McFarland, James McKinny, Michael Reveles, Sam Ridgeway, J.R. Riggs, Nico Ruvalcaba, Natalie Schauser, Melody Tan, Daniel Turvey, Wei Wu and Xuyang Zhang.

Powercast Wireless Power System

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.

Here’s a promo video from Powercast:

Powercast timeline from Iniko on Vimeo.

Resources:

LabVIEW based electric guitar effects pedals

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.

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