Off to Iran!

Once again our robots passed the security checks at the airport. And of course we had a lot of questions from other passengers and airport staff again. Despite that we passed faster than the family in front of us, who had several toy pistols in their hand luggage.

Iran15

Right now we are using the last moments of Internet in Germany to take a look at our airplane. We assume that it is not only the same, but also the identical airplane (joke got lost during translation).

More updates will follow later, when we spot internet access at our destination.

Hambot

Those of you who read our articles regularly already know that we are again building a new robot. His name is Hambot and he is the second version of GOAL, our robot we took to the world championships in Brazil last year.

Unfortunately GOAL had some problems to get up, because the relations of motor strength and weight were too bad. But during development last year we learned a lot about CAD and mechanics in robotics. Therefore we wanted to build a new version this season  and we did.

Hambot CADThe largest change, which can be seen directly, is that Hambot is produced nearly completely by 3D printing. This has many benefits for us, because we can produce our parts directly in the 3D printing lab next to our room. This  “Rapid Prototyping” allows us to create several different versions of a part on one day. For the metal parts we had to wait up to several days or even weeks every time. Additionally plastic weights less than aluminum and is cheaper. But the most important advantage are the richer design possibilities. The metal parts could only be arranged in angles of 90 degrees compared to 3D printing, which has nearly no restrictions. This also allows more human-like structures.

These weren’t the only changes we did. We also improved the interaction with the robot a lot. It now has more and illuminated buttons and a LCD touch display on his back. We also added an RGB-LED Ring on the front and a chip for speech synthesis, so we can understand our robot much better than with the previous software-solution.

HambotA very new field for us was the development of the electronics. More details will follow in a later article.

Luckily we were able to print the last parts and wire the electronics temporarily last week, because this week Hambot has to show his skills at the IranOpen. We wait eagerly!

Besides our new robot we had another reason to celebrate: Last week we handed in our first paper for the RoboCup symposium. Again more details will follow later.

Conclusively we had an eventful start in the new season. You will find more information about it in the Substanz magazine (a German popular-science magazine), which visited us last week to capture the atmosphere in the lab shortly before a competition.

Both, electronics and models for 3D printing can be found on our Github page, where we will release all our soft- and hardware as open source in future.

https://github.com/bit-bots

New homepage design

As you surely have noticed, things look different here since some days.

Our site really got long in the tooth. Since we have nobody working full time on it, we always have difficulties keeping the site in an adequate state. Of course we put most of our time in the development of the robots  but we kept you in mind. Before we don’t have any time because of the running season, we now want to use the time to make some improvements.

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The most important improvement is probably our “responsive” design. It means that the content of our page it automatically adjusted to your screen size. Smartphone users can now read our page without having their fingers hurt because of excessive scrolling.

The menu now follows your scrolling, so you have access to it at any time, no matter where you are reading on our page. Our website’s calendar is now automatically synced with SOGo, which is a groupware solution we have used internally for a while now.

Photos are a considerable problem for us. We would like to present you as many of them as possible, but it costs a lot of time to sort them, prepare them for the web and publish them in a good way. Therefore you will miss photos at many places. We even have more than thousands photos (yes, really!) of the last championships, which we want to release. In future people are asked to keep the camera only on a few interesting motives, but you may know how difficult it is to restrict yourself =)

From a technical point of view we already did a larger change some time ago: We replaced the free (as in beer), but restricted and increasingly less well maintained version of NextGen by the public domain plugin WPPA+, because we were increasingly dissatisfied with NextGen. (Those of you who visit us more regularly might have noticed that our gallery didn’t always work). WPPA+ is quite new and the functionality is already really great (means: we want to make some more changes). It was a lot of work to migrate the 1264 photos into the new system, unfortunately all titles and comments were lost during the procedure. It wasn’t worth for us to write a software which rescues this data. Also the order of the pictures isn’t optimal, as automatic ordering fails because of missing meta data  and we didn’t have time to order them manually.In the near feature we would like to add more photos successively and edit the existing ones. Just visit us from time to time!

tl;dr?

On the new website everything got better now, but nothing is perfect!

If you notices things which may not work as expected after the conversion, feel free to write us an email or a comment. We will prioritize by the amount of complains  and of course we take praises too 😉