WIT Applied Robotics Lab, Blue Technology

Here are three healthy head habits I learned over time to keep myself motivated and prevent stress: 1. Set personal aims in what you are doing: When you know exactly for what you are doing something, it almost does it by itself. With smaller aims leading to a bigger one, you can see you are moving forward. This helps especially to prevent stress and stay motivated during long and challenging tasks.  2. Time management: Even already, some intuitive time management can increase happiness and productivity at the same time. Especially important is free time management. Your free time is your most valuable source of energy to go on (for most people). Be sure to keep track of: how much you have at hand in the next few days/weeks having planned this time to spend with:  friends family hobbies nothing There are a lot of free apps that can help to start very easily.  It will also help you develop a feeling for how long you probably need for specific tasks. Thus, you can be aware i...

On Friday the 18th of March, as a group, we travelled to Killurin Bridge, County Wexford, for our first USV water trial. We left Waterford at 9am and arrived around 10am, giving us plenty of time to set up before  flood tide. The aim of this trial was to test a number of controls including; Manual Drive (Safety Override Test) Microbit Drive Cloud Drive via Ubidots (analogue input monitoring) Once our team lead, Jason, arrived with the USV, we unloaded his car and began setting up.  We separated into our separate teams. As I was part of the Cloud team, I powered up my MicroBit and connected it to my mobile hotspot. It took several minutes for the XinaBox GSP to find our location, but it soon began sending values to Ubidots.  We waited for Jason to launch his safety boat before we put the USV in the water. One of the electronic students, Patryck, accompanied Jason in the safety boat, bringing with him the physical controller for the USV. The physical controller acts as...

Overview In this blog post I am going to give a full overview of the experience we had using Xinabox and the various challenges and issue's we faced with the technology. Overall I think it's a good technology for Kids and engineers who are starting out to have a look at and try out, however, when it comes to this project or anything where you need reliable technology I would not recommend using Xinabox. Positives Firstly, let me go through some of the positives and information gathered from our experience with the technology. Quick and Easy hardware setup Plenty of online support and tutorials Huge range of xChips Good Microbit support Good Makecode Extensions Overall there were a lot of positives when we initially looked into using Xinabox, with plenty of examples of people using it in small household projects, and for teaching other people how to do program with makecode. Leading us to believe it would be an excellent choice for our USV project, especially since we were after...

 Serial communication continued This week the project leader Jason asked me to work on displaying the values that are sent from roborealm to the mocrobit on the LED of the microbit. Steps involved in displaying the values on the microbit LED Established serial connection between roborealm and the microbit Opened makecode on a browser window (which showed my already existing code from last week ) Took the on button A pressed block from the input extension and changed it to A+B. Placed the serial write string block from the serial extension and placed it in the on button A+B pressed block. Took the serial read string block from the serial exetension and placed it as a value in the serial write string block (meaning the value sent from roborealm will automatically be read into the serial write string block which in turn sends the value back to roborealm). Placed the show string block from the basic extension into the on button A+B pressed block under the serial write string block. Rem...

Serial communication continued This week the project leader Jason asked me to keep working on getting the serial connection between roborealm and the microbit to work. Problem encountered two weeks ago Wasnt able to establish the connection using the tera term editor. Steps involved to fix the problem above  Searched google on how to change the usb port communication number on windows Closed the roborealm application  Opened the control panel Clicked the on the usb port icon Changed the baud rate number to match that in robobrealm (115200). Reopened the roborealm app Ran the serial communication application Opened the serial communication window  Serial communication window showing the word connected in the console section of the window (proof  that the connection was established). After the connection was established i sent values from roborealm to the microbit and from the microbit back to roborealm. Steps involved in sending values to the microbit. Typed values in...