Dragisa Krsmanovic

LunchBox Lab is a cool project by Futurefarmers that is going to be in NYMOMA in February. I helped write the code for Arduino board that is used to run those LED dots.

I went to see presentation of Tesla Motors. It’s an electric powered sport car. It can do 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds and has radius around 200 miles. Most important is their battery pack which is composed of several thousand standard Li-Ion battery cells and weights around 950 lbs. It takes 3-4 hours to fully charge using 70 amp current (that means, with ordinary home plug, at ~12 amps, it would take you around 24hrs to fully charge the car). Another interesting thing is that, since electric motor (that weights only 70 pounds) can produce enough force at low rpm, it doesn’t really need gear. Tesla roadster has only two speeds and is completely electronically controlled.

Three days of Robogames were in San Francisco’s Fort Mason this weekend.

My interest was in autonomous sumo robot competition.

Robot sumo is played on round black steel plate. Edges are marked white so robots can detect boundaries. The goal is to make a robot that would detect the opponent and push him out of the ring. Robots are autonomous so there is no radio control. There are several categories : 25g nano, 100g micro, 500g mini, 3kg, LEGO ..etc.

In both 500g and 3kg categories, Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic won all first three places.

What I could see, for all their design they used Microchip dsPIC microcontrollers and 10-20 Sharp infrarred proximity sensors pointing in all directions. They also used, what I didn’t know was legal, magnets underneath their robots to increase traction. They were fast and pushed their oponents from the rink with ease.