Long time no see. I have been on a long hiatus, specifically for 6 months. I have been busy with the first year of high school, and I simply forgot to continue this blog. Whenever I do something robotics related, I rarely thought about writing another blog and would rather work on the robots themselves. After 6 months, I finally found some time to work on this blog. Oh boy, this is going to be a long one.

What happened during the 6 months?

On December 25, 2022 (Christmas), a tournament was held in Kyoto, with only teams from Kyoto participating, resulting in a smaller number of teams, including us. No matter the performance, as long as my team participated, we could join the Keijina tournament, so I wasn't so anxious about it. During the Kyoto tournament, one of my teammates accidentally broke the Arduino board of one of the robots while testing a program. Due to that, the robot couldn't have another program downloaded, and since we didn't have a spare board, we had to stick with the previously installed program. Unfortunately, the program had some errors, and the angel ring did not work as well as usual. However, the other robot's angel ring was still functional, and our team performed quite well, securing a nice 1st place. This outcome was expected because, excuse my disrespectful attitude but, the other teams weren't as strong as I had anticipated.

Fast forward a few weeks, around the beginning of January 2023 (I forgot the exact date), we participated in the Keijina tournament. We were well-prepared, having fixed the robot's program and brought spare parts that are vulnerable to damage, such as the Arduino board. This time, there were way more teams compared to the Kyoto tournament, including teams from other prefectures around Kyoto. Many of these teams had robots with advanced features like kickers, dribblers, and even programmed goalkeepers. Seeing these powerful robots lowered my self-esteem, and I didn't expect to be even in the top 3. However, contrary to my pessimistic expectations, we performed very well with a long winning streak. Unfortunately, it was broken in the very last match, and we ended up in second place. Reflecting on the tournament, we realized that we needed to change the switches of the robot. The small and hard-to-press switches sometimes caused our robots not to turn on properly at the start of matches, giving our opponents an easy advantage. Thankfully, we received news that we could participate in the country cup, which was scheduled for 3 months later. We began to think of ways to improve our robot, starting with changing the switch to a more user-friendly one. We also considered adding a kicker, but it didn't work out well due to space constraints inside the robot.

Fast forward a few months, and I was disappointed to find that our robot hadn't seen any major changes in the span of 3 months. Nonetheless, the country cup arrived, and it was held in Nagoya. The tournament ground was huge, with more than 70 teams participating. The level of competition was much higher, making even the robots I used to consider "strong" at Keijina seem like child's play. Additionally, to participate in the country cup, we had to create a poster showcasing our robots and team. I formatted the poster on Google Slides for visual appeal, and my teammates contributed to writing most of the content. Here is a screenshot of our digital poster:

I mean, compared to our last year’s poster, I think we improved a lot. Clearly there is more effort put into it, it is formatted better, it includes detailed descriptions, and it is just better in general. Doesnt mean this year’s poster is perfect by any means though.

(last year's photo [2022])

We managed to win most of our matches surprisingly, but with some draws and one defeat, we ended up in 14th place. Here is a photo of our robots during one of the battles. As you can see, my partner is waiting to press the switch (which we changed), as the match was about to begin. You can also see the opponent’s robot as well. Excuse the horrible camera work.

While it was an improvement from last year's 21st place, I had hoped to secure a spot in the top 10. Watching the matches featuring the strongest robots in the tournament gave me insights into what improvements our robots needed. We decided to add an OpenMV camera to help the robot detect its location on the game court, as well as a dribbler to maintain control of the ball and make accurate lunges toward the goal. We also planned to change the motors to more powerful and faster ones, use bigger wheels with better grip to prevent slipping and implement an attacker and goalkeeper system program. The attacker robot would chase the ball and try to score, while the goalkeeper robot would defend our goal. To improve our poster, we decided to add more details about our robots and drew inspiration from posters of other teams in the country cup. Finally, I would like to make the boots look a bit more professional, by making a normal handle. I mean, look at the robot on the left of the poster. It is literally three wooden pieces that are horribly aligned.

Currently, I am working on making our own wheels using a 3D printer, which I recently acquired (Ender 5 S1). Having our 3D printer allows me to accelerate the process of designing, printing, fixing, and reprinting the wheels, as it involves a lot of trial and error. I plan to write another blog about this experience in the near future, and it won't take as long as six months, I promise. Meanwhile, my two teammates are working on implementing an OpenMV camera using Python.

That is pretty much it for this blog. I am sorry for taking half a year to write another blog, and I promise I will post blogs way more often.

See you in another 6 months. Haha, I'm just kidding…

or am I?

Thanks for reading. Bye!!

It's finally Fall break, and I can't wait for Christmas!

My robot is getting old, and it is starting to break down. Just take a look at the top board of my robot: (the one on the very bottom is the old one, and the rest are failed attempts)

A part of it is even about to fall apart. Not only that but due to how the primary material used for the robot is slightly bendable, the places where bolts that connect the Arduino board to the rest of the robot are damaged, making a crater-like hole that makes the whole robot wiggly and unstable. I knew I needed to replace the robot with better material because every time I interacted with my robot, the more unstable it became. Luckily, my teacher has a 3D printer that can cut any shape out of any material on top of being able to print objects. Our team and our teacher agreed on using wood since it is more durable and not bendable. We were able to replace both the upper and lower base of our robots. I remade the top board of my robot at home (because I have a big wooden board that can be cut with a cutter knife), and though it took me many attempts, I was able to finish it in the end.

The final design looks like this:

It looks way better than before and is way stronger than before.

This is a significant improvement!

Thank you for reading!

I am here to give some updates on our upcoming Angel Ring.

As you might have seen last time, the angle ring has a lot of color sensors. The photo I used as an example had 20 sensors and LED, which is a lot. My point is, if we were to make the angel ring, we would need to connect many, many sensors with a soldering iron and etc. Doing that will be very challenging and time-consuming. So, we chose to use KiCad and Fusion 360.

KiCad is an "Open source software suite for Electronic Design Automation." In short, you can make boards without the use of soldering iron. Obviously, it will cost money to ask for a design manufacturer to make it and will take time to arrive, but it still saves a lot of work. Fusion 360 is a 3D printer software that will be useful for making small to medium-sized parts for our robots. I will be talking about Fusion 360 in the next post.

For KiCad, I started watching some tutorials on YouTube. For practice, I made a circuit board consisting of 1 battery case, 1 resistor, and 3 LED lights. It took time to download KiCad, learn the basic controls, and make the circuit itself. On top of that, KiCad crashed a lot of times for some reason(maybe I should fix my bad WiFI already).

In the end, I was able to finish it, and here are some images.

This is what I call the "sketch" version:

and this is what I call the "code" version: (Caution: these "sketch" and "code" are just names that I thought of)

and this is the 3D version:

It is quite simple and it looks like a middle school science project, but I think it is not bad for an absolute beginner like me. Except for the crashes, coding was actually quite fun, and I enjoyed it. I am looking forward to making more boards.

This is a short one, I know.

Thanks for reading,

Wow, it has been a long time since the last time I wrote my blog, lol. My new school year started, and it is already difficult. It just gets harder and harder.

Now let's talk about robotics. My robotics teacher suggested we (me and my partner, Noda) improve our color sensor. At first, I disagreed; I thought the speed of the robot was everything. However(and thankfully), I realized that the speed of the robots isn't the main factor that makes them strong. Even if it is fast, if the line sensors can't catch up to the speed and go out of the white line, the robot is just going to be a burden. I was lucky enough to encounter a good example in the national cup, where one of the teams I competed against had robots so so fast I thought they were using F1 motors. However, it was too fast for the robot to control itself, and it would usually go out of the white line and even did multiple own goals which lead to our team's victory.

So, my partner and I are planning on changing our line sensors, and putting them in an alignment called the "angel ring." We were inspired by that idea of many teams(professional ones), as we thought it is a better way to align our line sensors than aligning them like a cross right now. Photo of a robot(not ours) with the angel ring

Photo of a robot(not ours, again) with the cross alignment

Now, why is the angel ring better than the cross? This is because if you use the cross, even though the situation is different, the same color sensors might be detecting the white line. Here is a digital sketch I drew:

The purple line is where the line sensors are aligned, and the red line is the line sensors that detect the white line. As you can see, even though they are completely different scenarios, the white line is both detected by the same line sensors, thus will get the robot out of the white line.

How about angel ring? With the angel ring, the same color sensors reacting in different situations would be prevented. Here is an image for a better understanding:

The red circles are the line sensors detected. With the angel ring, the color sensors will be able to differentiate scenarios, thus preventing even more possibilities of going over the white line.

I think making the angel ring is going to be a challenging obstacle for our team. However, it will be a huge upgrade for our robots, because what's the point of making a fast, smart robot if it goes over the white line all the time?

I hope you enjoyed reading it, see you soon!

(This paragraph is about how my day went, so you can ignore it if you want to) Today I finished a classic book called "The Lord of the Flies." Though I had some trouble understanding the context(only sometimes), I still really enjoyed it, and I recommend it!

Anyways, today I finished programming my summer project. If you don't know what my summer project is, it is basically my robot reading a color using its color sensor and depending on the color, it will move(not just move, but move in all sort of ways). For example, if it senses the color red, it will move recutalgular(I hope that makes sense).

My summer project in total took some time. I first needed to make the board(the image above), which did not take a lot of time and was probably the easiest part. Then, I needed to know the number of the colors. What I mean is, my color sensor reads colors it is seeing by numbers. Here is an image:

There are four rows that is going vertically. Why there are many numbers going up to down is because I made a program that reads the color every 0.1 seconds, so the page fills up with numbers quickly. I took the image when the robot was reading the color black, so the number of the color black is around 960. After I wrote down the numbers for the colors black, green and red, I needed to program the robot to react depending on the number of the color the color sensor is reading. For example if the color sensor is reading the numbers 960, it means the color it is seeing is black. Finally, I needed to write programs for the robot to move(spinning, triangle and square) when it reads a color. The shapes(triangle and square) were especially difficult because the more sides the shape had, the longer the program was. After many trial and error and many hours spent, I was able to finish it. My program had no errors at the end, and my robot moved as I imagine it to be.

These are videos of my robot reacting to the colors. I used a color tape and put it under the robot(which is where one of the color sensors are located) for it to react. Why I am using a color tape and not using the board like the image on the very top is because I accidentally left it at my robot club's office, and I was not bothered to make another one.

Black(triangle): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/82sZXIi1s90

Green(spin): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XfEeFhaezhQ

Red(square): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-izh1pT5pkw

The movements arent perfect, and the "360" degree turn wasnt even 360; it was almost 720 degrees. However, I think I still did not bad. Yes there are room for improvements, but at the end of the day, it is just a summer project. I will leave it as it is, and move on improving my robot. Some day I might go back and fix some parts, or maybe not.

Well, I guess I will be concluding my small summer project.

Thank you for reading,