David's Blog

9-Nov-09

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:37:00 +0000

Robo-Chopper Interface program available!

The Robo-Chopper is coming along! The team is currently in Phase 1 of development. We have recently finished work on the first version of the Interface, you can download it from the wiki. If you have any comments/suggestions please email me.

V:Visitors, new show on ABC

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:46:00 +0000

me: dude so i watched the pilot for this new show on abc tonight
Mike: whats it about?
me: sucking ass
its like the writers decided to make a hybrid of independence day and 24, which was an awful idea
Mike: yes
me: then the jonas brothers and miley cyrus peed on the script.

11-Sep-09

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:07:00 +0000

Recently my website has been down due to financial reasons. However, we're back!

I've been doing a lot of work for the Robo-Chopper. Here's a picture of the CAD model for the Test-Stand I'm going to build. Woot for Alibre Express (free 3D CAD software).

I'm pretty much all moved into my new apartment, in Belleville IL. It's kind of big, plus I have room for my office/shop. Which I have quickly littered with sawdust and solder.

By the way, Always Remember.

5-Aug-09

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:00:00 +0000

It's been a busy Summer! Besides finishing my Electrical Engineering degree at SIUC, I "participated" in an in-land hurricane, started a new job, and broke up with my girlfriend.

However, the Robo-Chopper is coming along (slowly) but it is, I promise. Right now I'm currently developing the Remote Control Unit (RCU) for the Chopper, which will be a XBox 360 Controller, slightly modified. The RCU incorporates a Propeller (duh), and of course is Open-Source. All my code is on my Google Code SVN, which you can look at from my site. The RCU is being developed for the 2009 Parallax Design Contest, so root for me! It will also be compatible with the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) Protocol too, (eventually), with a SPIN Library developed by, you guessed it, me. When this is all working I'll post it on here as well as the Parallax Object Exchange.

By the way, Danica McKellar, if you ever ditch your d-bag composer husband, I'm available. (Also taking applications.)

Rocket Plane version 3

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:23:00 +0000

Put up a site for my Rocket Plane project, you can see it here. Had a very successful test fire of a rocket engine today, hopefully by this weekend at least one plane will be launched. Pictures and videos will be added to that site soon.

Keep working on the Robo-Chopper, working on some DSP for the complementary filter for measuring the angle, using an accelerometer and a gyroscope sensor. There's a lot more work to do with it though, so stay tuned.

Graduated and New Project

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Sun, 24 May 2009 13:15:00 +0000

So I graduated. Yay.

More importantly, I'm starting on another project with a good friend of mine, Michael Welling. To honor the release of Terminator Salvation, we are making a robotic helicopter.

Yeah it's awesome I know. We are still in very preliminary planning stages but expect some cool stuff out of this.

You can check out our project website. We will also be setting up an SVN for anyone to view, bill of materials and an Engineering Notes page to detail our development work.

SIU Robotics in the Daily Egyptian

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 14:50:00 +0000

SIU Robotics was featured in the Daily Egyptian today.
Daily Egyptian Article

I'd like to thank everyone who is involved with SIU Robotics, we couldn't get anywhere without dedicated people!

Also, the FRC Regional is this weekend in St. Louis. You can get more info here:
Team Website
Blue Alliance Info
Chief Delphi
St. Louis Regional Info

25-Nov-08

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 03:30:00 +0000

I've been doing some pretty extensive upgrades to my Library although almost all the files are still in Alpha testing, due to the fact that I still don't have access to the Control System. But it will come soon though, I can feel it! With these upgrades, the library now has support for the following items:

Omni-Drive Drivetrain
Servo Tracking
Pan/Tilt Servo Searching
Ultrasonic Sensor support
Accelerometer Sensor support
Gyroscope Sensor support
Wheel encoder support
AXIS Camera support
Environment Mapping

As far as I know, these are all the sensors (except the IR Control Board) that the FRC competition usually uses. When I get the control system I will start debugging all the code (although I hope none of it is too bad...). Thanks!

16-Nov-08

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 19:11:00 +0000

So I went to a workshop yesterday for the new FRC 2009 Control System, very exciting stuff! Today I developed a LabView application for the implementation of the AXIS 206 Camera for this Control System, it includes a Searching algorithm and a Tracking algorithm. You can find it in my Library. Note, I can't test it yet until I get the Control System or another Team does it for me. Thanks!

13-Nov-08

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 16:29:00 +0000

So our Senior Design Team has just finished our Proposal for "Rikki", at long last. We still have a long way to go but we see the light at the end of the tunnel now! I've also been asked by our local ASME Chapter to help them out with their Design Competition (a.k.a. Robot!) project, "Mars Rocks". When that gets up to a higher priority level, I'll start posting designs and spec's on my Projects Page.

6-Nov-08

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 02:55:00 +0000

Well it looks like my idea of doing position mapping with the NXT isn't working out so well. There is a firmware (FW 1.21) that supports floating point operations but Lego isn't supporting it so it isn't available for public use, and LabView isn't capable of creating this functionality either. So until I can get this FW level for the NXT, I'm going to move on to bigger and better things. I've been updating my Library lately and adding some documentation for the items.

3-Nov-08

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:40:00 +0000

Today I finished the CAD model for my Pan/Tilt Mount for the NXT, you can find it in my Library.

Now on to bigger and better things...I found out today that the NXT w/ Labview does not support floating point math, to my dismay. Hopefully someone has developed this functionality so far, and I'm going to continue to work on my position localisation algorithm for the NXT. And if I can't find it, I'll make it. :)

Halloween

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:58:00 +0000

To celebrate for Halloween, I decided to post some pics of my pan/tilt mount so far. It's still a work in progress so expect some renders in the next couple of days. The next project i'm going to work on with this is to do some environment mapping, but since the NXT doesn't have support for trig functions I'm going to need to develop support for that too. I'll probably do this just using LUT's but if anybody has any other ideas let me know.

Pan Mount

Tilt Mount w/ Ultrasonic

NXT w/ Ultrasonic

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 02:33:00 +0000

So I finished up the first part of this project, the robot pans and tilts like a champ! It's been running for about 2 hours now, which is good because I was worried about some mechanical issues with the Lego gears and with how consistent the Lego motors are, but it looks to be running really well. When it detects an object at a certain distance it stops searching. I would like to make the tracking more advanced, although it might be fairly complex since the ultrasonic is pretty coarse. More updates to follow.

New library, Pan-Tilt Done

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:49:00 +0000

So I finished the Pan-Tilt demo in LabView for my NXT side-project, and I figured I should start pushing the things I've done up to my website so other people can check them out. I did this by adding a new page to my site, http://www.thesciencedude.com/library/librarymain.htm
I will be posting a CAD file for my pan-tilt mount in the next couple days, so stay tuned!

On a side-note, congratulations Mike and Amy!

NXT w/ LabView

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 02:48:00 +0000

So I got a NXT kit from a colleague at work, and I'd like to start developing some functionality for it. My ideas so far:

Develop a ultrasonic mapping tool that works on a guided stationary turret (1 DOF now, possibly 2 later) that displays a graph of how far away objects are.
Develop some control algorithms (including some limited PID controls) for motor positioning. this would be applicable for the classical inverted pendulum problem.
Maybe some fairly complex line following, I've never been a huge fan of this kind of application just because its not a very realistic real-world solution (and it makes it worse when people think that it is) but it is interesting nonetheless.

This is of course in concurrence with all the other work I'm involved with as well, so it might be awhile before I am able to post any documents. But I'll try to knock this out and see what the NXT can really do.

My First Blog

noreply@blogger.com (David Gitz) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 05:35:00 +0000

Hi, thanks for coming to my blog. In the future, this blog will be all about the different projects that I work on in the fields of robotics, control engineering, embedded systems and that kind of thing. Please feel free to comment as much as you want. Thanks for stopping by!