BLOG MOVED

I moved my blog to a new platform I put together myself on keeganmann.com. I already have a couple new articles posted.

Click here to continue to my new blog: www.keeganmann.com

I2C Motor Controller Board

Read it on my new Blog: www.keeganmann.com

Partially assembled first revision of the Motor Controller Board

I’ve recently been developing an I2C motor controller board for UC Berkeley’s Pioneers in Engineering (PiE), a club who’s purpose is to run a high school robotics competition. PiE creates the kit of parts which high schoolers use to create their robots and provides them with college mentors to help them through the process of building their robot. This year, this means building a motor controller to provide a cheaper alternative to the Pololu Simple motor controller.

Yahoo Hackathon 2011 – A Ninja Physics Platformer

A room full of hackers

A hackathon, a hacker neologism, is an event when programmers meet to do collaborative computer programming.

I got a group together from my computer science class to work on a project. Eventually, we decided on a puzzle platformer involving physics elements. The hackathon ran from 6:00 pm on

FRC Stats System

Staring at the stats display.

I’ve been working on a web application for recording statistics for FIRST Robotics Competition teams during a competition. I’m a member of FRC team #3255, and our main website is located at: www.nurdrobotics.com. This system is intended to be used for entering data on teams during a competition. It is capable of logging specific data such as number of tubes placed so that we can make more informed decisions with our alliances and hopefully during the process of alliance selection for the finals. It can also be used to record responses to surveys.

Code

I recently moved the code from SVN on Google code to GitHub:
https://github.com/keeganmann/FRC-Stats.

Blinker Circuit for Robotics Team Pin

Result

I’d never made a permanent blinking light circuit before, so I thought I’d try adding cool, blinking lights to a pin from my FIRST Robotics Competition team.  It turns out that a 9-volt battery is too heavy for a pin, so I ended up making it into a necklace.

The front of the pin (click to see it blink)

The back of the pin with electronics visible.

Animated GIF of the LEDs blinking

Intel International Science and Engineering Fair

Group picture of finalists from San Diego.

The Intel®   International Science and Engineering Fair® (Intel ISEF), the world’s largest international pre-college science competition, provides an annual forum for more than 1,500 high school students from 65 countries, regions, and territories

The Intel ISEF was an incredible experience.  I got to meet Bill Nye personally and hear presentations from several Nobel Laureates not to mention meeting people from all over the world.  Our group went to Disneyland, and Universal Studios which was closed to all but ISEF exhibitors for the night.  Now that it’s over, I can’t believe it has only been a week.  My only disappointment is that it is unlikely that anyone from my school will ever again do a science fair project, let alone make it to the international level.

See Also:

• Greater San Diego Science and Engineering Fair
• Intel ISEF Official Web Site

Light Sensor and Motion Sensor Using ThingSpeak, Arduino, and Processing

Thingspeak.com allows one to post information gathered by a networked device in real time.  I decided that I would test out the system with a simple light sensor. Then, I went further by developing a new Processing application which detects motion using a webcam and posts it to a ThingSpeak channel.

I’ve been working with microcontrollers for some time, but Thingspeak.com is a great way to connect those microcontrollers to the world.