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Home News 2012.05.21
by Emcee Grady |
May 21, 2012 |
20 comments
Our Autonomous Vehicle Competition is less than a month away now (June 16, 2012 at SparkFun Headquarters). It's shaping up to be an awesome day! We've created an updated course preview so you'll know what to expect on the day of the race. Check it out!
If you have any more questions, leave them below and we'll try to get to them. Also, if you are planning on attending as a spectator, please register at our EventBrite page. Hope to see you there!
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Comments 20 comments
I’m curious why your using a VCR. I would have avoided that like the plague but I’m guessing there’s a good reason.
It will be two VCRs with jog/shuttle control so we can easily replay, and also have a record of the event. we could do a hard drive recorder, but a VCR is much cheaper and we don’t need high resolution, we just need to see when things cross the finish line.
there is significantly more redundancy and such that’s not portrayed in the video. We wanted some simple to operate as well as robust.
The tiny booth at Maker Faire SF must of drained your funds
Yeah, that booth was about as minimal as it could get. I didn’t even stop there because it didn’t look like SparkFun had anything to show in the booth. Not even beginner kits to peddle. I guess SparkFun has enough experience with Maker Faire to know what they will get out of it so they can calculate the ROI, but if SparkFun can’t pick up new customers at Maker Faire, then I’d have to say “you’re doing it wrong.”
Sparkfun had wanted to continue at the Maker Faire with their same presence as in years past, with soldering classes, freebies, etc., but the big giant brains at Maker Faire Headquarters increased their rent by 400%. Now I understand rising costs tough economy blah blah blah, but none of that warrants a 400% increase in booth space costs. They figured that any presence was better than no presence at all, thus the much smaller booth. **NOTE – I am not a Sparkfun employee (yet), nor am I authorized to speak on their behalf. These are simply my own observations and points of view, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of Sparkfun.
HeliCopterGuy got the gist of it, but you can read more about our decision here
Ahem…shouldn’t you be using this in addition to photo finish? I have been doing contract work for a professional race track and they use transponders for the vehicles. It would be very cool to use some Sparkfun parts for measuring line crossings, no?
The reason we’re not using RFID tags is that the reader modules we carry only read tags within a few inches. This is fine for most applications, but it would have taken over a hundred reader modules to completely cover our start/finish line. We have to pay for these things too, and the cost was prohibitive.
We ARE looking into related technologies like active tags and more powerful readers, so we may take advantage of this technology in the future.
Yeah, I can see that. I wonder if you could increase the sensitivity over a wide area by using a long magnet wire as part of the inductor. Of course that may take a lot more power to get the tags to read. Also, if two tags are being read it may mess up the data that comes back. So it may not be practical anyway. It would be a cool showcase in the future though. If I come up with something I will let you know. Just gotta get my subconscious working on it in the background. :)
The system isn’t reliable and it can’t read two at once, and there’s no way to tell when it actually CROSSES the finish line. It would just tell you when it approaches it.
Dosen’t look a VCR… considering you can watch the video with 1080p…
Awesome. Sounds like some great solutions for crowd control and timing! Nice job! Data Bus and I are looking forward to it!
How much will we know about how many barrels and what segments of the course they will be on? Looking for obstacles slows things down.
So I’d like to know when I’ve found all the obstacles in a certain section of the course so we can speed up till the next obstacle search…
All of this is explained in the video. 4 barrels, on the first straight leg of the building.
I went on-site to test my car out this weekend and the pothole on the west side of the building is nothing to dismiss. It was full of water from the rain showers. One splash and we were done for the day. Had to go home and order a new ESC. I hope it gets delevered in time for raceday.
Ouch. :( If not, and you’re in a pinch I have an extra Traxxas XL5 brushed ESCs and Titan12T you can borrow.
Is there going to be a live stream from the event this year??
Yes! Watch for details as we get closer to the event.
Whoa! I had estimated 860' using Google Maps. I had no idea it was so accurate!
Is there no longer a time bonus for a complete autonomous takeoff?