WIT Applied Robotics Lab, Blue Technology

Before our first USV testing, we came together as a whole group to wrap up certain areas of development. This was our first time physically working alongside some of the students from different years and courses.  After successfully connecting the XinaBox GPS to Ubidots, Jason teamed me up with 2nd year Internet of Things students, Adam and Dominick, to send a temperature value from MicroBitA to MicroBitB and C using radio connection. The idea of this connection is to eventually send current and voltage values from the USV to Ubidots for monitoring and evaluation.  Adam and Dominick had previous experience using radio connections and therefore sending the values from one MicroBit to another were rather easy to set up. Adam and Dominick needed to display the received values on the console whereas I needed to push these values to Ubidots and display them on the dashboard. We decided to send 4 different values instead of just temperature to make the results easier to read.  ...

 USV test This week is the first of out of three iterations of the USV test. Jason our project leader picked the location( kilicurn rowing club located in wexford ), day (Friday) and time (10am - 2pm) for testing. Upon arrival, the project leader assigned jobs to the different teams involved in the project which were: USV setup (David and Patrick (IoT year 2)) Microbit radio signal setup (Adam (Engineering year 3)) Xinabox setup (Kevin and Erinn (IoT year 4)) Tello setup (Jack (Iot year 4)) Photography (Myself and Dylan (IoT and Automotive year 4)) USV setup Steps taken Thrusters attachment to the USV Power button attachment to the hood of the control panel for easy accessibility Microbit radio signal setup Steps taken Code redownload for the main microbit (which is based in the control panel) Code redownload for the microbits that controls the left and right thrusters on the USV Connection of all microbits to power Xinabox setup Steps taken Powering on the devices (via USB)  ...

 This week I was asked by team leader Jason to get object color tracking working in roborealm using the green ball. the RGB filter application Steps taken Clicked on the colour green to filter only the green colours Left the remaining default settings Clicked ok to exit Placed the green ball in front of the webcam  The Center Of Gravity application Steps taken  Set the stop tracking pixel area and density to below 0.02% and 10% in the filter section Set the show bounding box area to around 80% of the pixel Left the remaining default  Clicked ok to exit Placed the green ball in front of the webcam then the bounding box and the x and y coordinates of the ball was displayed Mean filter Steps taken Set the mean filter size of the green ball to 12 so that the ball can be seen from afar and not pieces of the ball Clicked ok Placed the green ball in front of the webcam saw it was blurry which is one of the effects of setting the mean filter size Placed the green far away fr...

 USV Water Test    Dylan Haley Entry #4 This week we took our USV on its first water test. Our aim of this initial test was to test the following: Safety Override Manual Drive - Test the control of the USV using the radio RC transmitter Microbit Manual Drive - Test the control of the USV using microbits Ubidots Cloud Analog Inputs - Test analog inputs back from USV xina box microbit ecosystem to Ubidots Cloud Overall our first water test was very successful and I am very happy with the progress we as a team have made. It was great to finally see the USV we have all been working so hard actually float and drive in the water. There are a few small issues that we have discovered and we can spend time fixing these for the next water test. Both the safety override manual drive test and the microbit manual drive were a success. However, there is a slight issue with our motors as our current design had negative effects when reversing. The motors are currently operating between ...

Introduction This week we did our first Water test for the USV, it was a great success. It was very nice to see nearly the whole team together to work on the USV and test all the various different aspects of the project and see it coming together. Arrival We all travelled down to Killurin Bridge down in Wexford to a nice area to test out the USV. I attached some photos of the area below. The plan was to arrive at 10pm and leave at about 2am, giving us plenty of time to set everything up and account for any potential delays. Once we got to the destination, we started unloading all the equipment to do some final building of the USV and get it ready to go into the water. Our project lead went off to get the Safety boat and while he was gone we split into our different teams to prepare everything. Preparation I was part of the team responsible for the Cloud tests and making sure Ubidots worked as expected. The first thing we had a look at was the GPS on the Microbit, as usual it was taking...

Introduction This blog entry will go through the process the team undertook to get a working "Hello World" example of an analogue input coming from Ubidots down to a motor to control it's speed. This was a major aspect of work to figure out for the project and I worked with a team member from another class to get it working. It was really good getting to work with someone from a different area of knowledge and bouncing work off each other and learning how to combine the work we had both done, it took a lot of communication and teamwork to get this aspect of the project working. I had done a lot of work with Ubidots at this point and knew how to get value's down to Microbits, my team member had done a lot of work with radio signals between Microbits and sending and receiving value's between Microbits and to the motors. It was now time to combine the two to get a message from Ubidots to a Motor through the Microbits. Ubidots The first step in the process was for me ...

 Introduction This week I moved on to working on getting a GPS value from our Microbit with the Xinabox xChips to Ubidots. I was in a team of two with my other classmate to get this working and it came with a lot of challenges. After last week trying to get the values up and down from Ubidots via the Xinabox xChips we learned that the xChips can be very ureliable and often will just stop working for a random amount of time and start working again, without changing any code on the Microbit. I plan on looking more into that at a later point, this week we want to get a proof of concept that the xChips can display GPS to Ubidots. Microbit Makecode The first thing we needed to design was the makecode to get the GPS value to return to Ubidots. We started by using the code we had previously worked on for sending and receiving a value from Ubidots and then added in the extension for the SN01 xChip. The SN01 xChip is a xChip that has time, GPS and speed tracking capability's. Making it an e...

After successfully connecting to Ubidots via the CW01 XinaBox xChip, the next step was to connect the SN01  GPS xChip, in order to communicate with the USV and Tello drone. At first glance it seemed like a simple setup, installing the SN01 MakeCode extension and sending the longitude and latitude values to Ubidots.  However, when powered up, the Microbit displayed three dots, meaning "System busy – do not click buttons" according to the troubleshooting guide .  After waiting several minutes with no luck, I began to doubt my GPS xChip since we had accidentally inserted it upside down at one stage which may have fried the chip. I contacted XinaBox support regarding my struggles and was advised to be outside away from any tall buildings that could interrupt the satellite signals and to give the device time to download the almanac,  a regularly updated digital schedule of satellite orbital parameters for use by GNSS receivers . Unfortunately , it was raining very heavy...

  Ardupilot Research and Design - Dylan Haley Entry #3 Our USV requires autonomous driving capabilities so myself and Nikolas have been tasked with researching into Ardupilot as a possible option for this. Ardupilot is an open source autopilot system which supports multiple vehicle types. After my initial research Ardupilot seemed like a likely possibility for our project.  Ardupilot on Raspberry Pi Initially we wanted to see if it would work if we ran Ardupilots software in the loop (SIL) application on a raspberry pi to simulate the environment in order to test the path planning capabilities. After attempting to install and setup the application on my raspberry pi I came across the following issues: The documentation provided was confusing at times. The installation process was long. The Ardupilot mission planner software works natively on windows a lot easier. My Ardupilot SIL application crashed whenever I tried to start it. Luckily Nikolas was able to get Ardupilot SIL wo...

                                                                                      Dylan Haley - Entry#2 Dashboard Research So far I have researched multiple dashboards including Ubidots and Azure. After later splitting into groups and delegating the work I was tasked with researching into Wappsto:bits NB-IoT+. This device has a GPS unit built in which I have been tasked with trying to use with the Kids IOT cloud to see if it is able to be used with other cloud networks other than the Wappsto:bit cloud network. After creating the makecode to test the microbit with NB-IoT+ I realised I was still having issues getting GPS coordinates to display. After trying to solve this myself I decided it would be best to reach out to Wappsto:bit di...

Dylan Haley - Entry#1 I am a fourth year student in Waterford Institute of Technology studying a Bsc in Applied Computing (Automotive & Automation). I 21 years old and from Cork. By the end of this project I would like to see the USV on the water with basic autonomous point to point movement using our dashboard and cloud network. As for what I would like to get out off the project myself, I want to improve my team working skills and learn how to operate better and more efficiently as part of a team. 

OVERVIEW This post covers our starting point on the topic of path-planning, how far we are with it’s implementation and how we got there. It also includes information of the software suite ardupilot, purchase recommendations for needed hardware and a small wiki of useful links I wish I had known earlier. This post is – apart from providing purchase recommendations – designed as a first step into ardupilot, with particular focus on USV implementations. (USV = unmanned surface vehicle) Let’s get things started! STARTING POINT: WHY WE NEED PATH-PLANNING Our project – let’s name it “THE USV” during this post – should not just be unmanned, but also autonomously. Autonomously control means in this context: Drawing waypoints on a map in some UI. T he USV follows them instantly . The “some UI” shall be a w idget from the Ubidots D ashboard. With this, we reach our first obstacle: Ubidots does not provide on board waypoint functionality. Therefore, our project leader Jason came up with ...

 Team meeting Jason the team leader asked me to look into sharing my ubidots dashboard with the team in order for them to be able to view the livestream.  Issue encountered  Livestream wasnt able to display on my team members devices even though they were connected on the same network as the webserver Steps taken to solve this issue  Started the webserver on a different network  Steps taken to start the webserver on a different network Disconnected my laptop from the colleges wifi  Enabled my mobile hotspot Connected my laptop to my hotspot Refreshed ubidots and livestream was working perfectly Got one of my team member Dylan to connect to my hotspot Shared my dashboard with him  After the dashboard link was shared, he clicked the link and livestream still wasnt showing.The next step taken to solve this issue was streaming the livestream on twitch replacing the url in my ipframe html code on ubidots. Steps taken to streaming the livestream on twitch Cr...

Introduction Following on from last week, we looked into getting a Ubidots video feed working via twitch and then moved on to tackling integrating a Microbit onto Ubidots and into the system. Ubidots Video Feed After the work performed last week I thought about just streaming a video to a live streaming platform online, we decided to look into using twitch as the link from the camera feed up to Ubidots via an IFrame. After a bit of work we managed to get this working successfully, we got a video feed from my laptop going up onto twitch then onto the Ubidots Platform. However, it was very slow, and constantly refreshing or freezing, which would not be good enough for our use case with the USV, this delay and freezing of the video was probably down to the hardware and network connection, but the potential of the video feed going down in the middle of the water was to great to pursue this further. Microbit & Xinabox We decided to take our success of getting it working and move onto t...