See what's snowballing in the winter landscapes with robots!
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| Lo!
Welcome back fellow Adventurebot! This winter has brought wonderful
snow to the region for the robots to explore in. Let’s dive in to what’s
been happening! |
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| Throwback
to Bowie the robot! Here’s Bowie exploring on the ice on Collins Bay in
Kingston, Ontario, Canada. In this Field Test, Bowie was equipped with
an air quality monitor (donated from uRADMonitor) and logging the sensor data to GPS coordinates. Plus, a paracord tether back to shore, just in case. Bowie's battery, a 2 cell LiPo, was swapped once during this test. |
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| Bowie ready for adventure on ice |
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| Attaching tether to reel Bowie back in if it falls through the ice |
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Bowie's tire treads prints in snow |
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| Here’s
a Field Test with Bowie on a thin ice expedition! This is an earlier
version of Bowie than in the photos, at the same location. Check out the video here |
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| Introducing Apisuru! A bee frame design featuring sensor panels and pockets for electronics that is designed for 3D printing. |
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| Apisuru's deep frame dimensions are based on the widely used Langstroth Hive. Foundation can be installed inside the frame by sliding it between the rails in the upper and lower bars. |
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| A future step is to add electronics to Apisuru, using off-the-shelf parts as a prototype. |
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| The
initial foray into this has already led to an open source contribution!
While developing the IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) code, we noticed
that the IMU resolution was not giving an updated result when different
ranges were set for the accelerometer and gyroscope. This led to implementing a fix and submitting an issue and pull request to the MPU6050 library by ElectronicCats, a company that also makes open hardware, located in Mexico! Great news, they were able to replicate it on their setup,
and the fix resolved the problem. The commit was merged into the
library! This will be included in the MPU6050 library update, which can
be downloaded through the Arduino IDE library manager. |
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| Robot Butterfly had a chance to play in the snow earlier this season! |
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| The
lower temperature effects the robot's power supply. Robot Butterfly is
powered by AA batteries (by design!), which as alkaline batteries can
operate down to -18 °C. Though, most of the time, we are using
rechargeable Li-Ion batteries in the AA formfactor. Further testing is
needed to determine the operating temperature range on those batteries.
Robot Butterfly can also be powered through its USB-C port with an
external battery pack.
Check out our @RobotInThePark Instagram in the meantime for more photos!
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| PS: Erin Kennedy, you are receiving this because *unrolls a long papyrus scroll and checks notes* Erin’s talk at TEDxOttawa (virtual) - 2020 This newsletter dispatches approximately once per month — unless one of our robots does something particularly epic — and includes highlights from our community events (Robot In The Park) and behind the scenes updates on our robot development (Robot Missions). |
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