Standard time
While I despise switching between daylight savings time and standard time, the switch does bring new timing to regular routines that can suprise you! 
 

A Modicum of Fun
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Separating mjbots.com from jpieper.com
For many years https://jpieper.com was a home for my personal writings and projects. As some of those projects turned into mjbots, the line became pretty blurry. To try and shore up some personal work/life balance, I’ve moved nearly all posts that in hindsight were “mjbots” related over to https://blog.mjbots.com and removed them from here. 
 There should be redirects for all…
Sousaphone sound-reactive lights
Blinking lights is something that I guess I’ve been enamored with for a while - see 2001 dorm (with awesome work from Brad on visualizations) , 2007 bike , and 2015 trumpet . When I got a last minute opportunity to play sousaphone at this year’s HONK fest with Brassterisk I figured I needed something to dress up my otherwise rather drab horn. 
 
 The "control board" 
 
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I am away until mid-August
If this space is looking stale, that’s because it is! I am traveling until the middle of August. Look forward to more robot and Pocket NC updates then! 
 In the meantime, check out these cool posts from the last year: 
 
 First day jumping! - The first jumping leg I had 
 moteus brushless servo open source release - Where I announced and published the source code and hardware…
ICFP 2019 Programming Contest
For many years now on and off I’ve played in the programming contest associated with the International Conference on Function Programming. Each time it has been fun, exhilarating, and definitely humbling! www.icfpcontest.org 
 This year, the competition runs from Friday June 21st through Monday June 24th. Once again we’ll be competing as “Side Effects May Include…".…
Super Mega Microbot in Robogames 2016
Earlier in April we took Super Mega Microbot out to California to compete in Mech Warfare during Robogames 2016. Thanks to the R-TEAM organizers who made the event happen this year. We were really excited, and the event as a whole went off really well! There were a lot of functional mechs attending, and many fights that were exciting to watch. 
 
 Most of the mechs which competed
Functional gimbal stabilized Mech Warfare turret
Well, that took longer than I expected! I last showed some progress on a gimbal stabilized turret for Mech Warfare competitions more than six months ago. Due to some unexpected technical difficulties, it took much longer to complete than I had hoped, but the (close to) end result is here! 
 
 Complete gimbal mounted turret 
 
 

 Here’s a quick feature list: 
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Progress on Super Mega Microbot
I have some incremental progress to report on various parts of Super Mega Microbot. First, I have a draft fully assembled leg for a mammal walking configuration. It is mostly just the stock Dongbu brackets, with a custom Shapeways print at the final joint holding a standoff and rubber stopper. 
 
 Prototype mammal jointed leg 
 
 

 Second, I’ve been working on a…
Boston Mech Warfare Expo 2015 - First look
We just concluded the first ever Boston Mech Warfare Expo this weekend, held at Jaybridge Robotics in Cambridge. We had a lot of exciting mech fighting action, learned a lot, and even had a fair amount of exciting repairs! There are many hours of video I need to sort through, but in the meantime, here are some photos:…
Parts arrived for Super Mega Microbots Scoring System!
A whole lot of laser cut parts and printed boards just arrived for the scoring system for Super Mega Microbot. We’ll get them put together and tested soon!…
Updated power control board for Savage Solder
In our efforts to reduce weight and complexity for Savage Solder, over the Christmas holiday and first couple of months of 2015 we designed a new computer system based on the Odroid U3 instead of the Mini-ITX form factor PC we had used previously. 
 Functions 
 To make that happen, we put together a new power control board which was designed as a “shield” for the Odroid. It has…
Savage Solder wins Robomagellan at Robogames 2015
Savage Solder competed in the Robomagellan event in the newly restored and most impressive Robogames 2015 this past weekend. We had two successful runs out of 3, one with no bonus cones and one which touched the challenging 0.01 bonus cone. Both runs put us on the top of the leaderboard. 
 
 
 

 
 
 

 Other competitors 
 Here are links to videos I found or…
New LCD for Savage Solder
As part of preparing Savage Solder for events this spring, I’ve been overhauling the computer and sensing platform to have higher reliability and lower weight. One of the changes was a new LCD and input interface. 
 I wrote up the previous LCD here before , which was the width of the car, pretty heavy, and not resistant to the elements. For this version, I wanted to use a smaller screen,…
First Firing Session
To act as a forcing function in our development of Super Mega Microbot, we put together a Mech Warfare style qualification video, showing it driving around for more than 5 minutes shooting at some targets. Here it is! 
 
 

legtool now on github
legtool is the library and graphical application I’ve developed for inverse kinematics and gait generation to use with Super Mega Microbot . I’ve pushed a public version of it to github , in the hopes that it may be useful for other developers of legged robots. 
 I’ve also put together a short demonstration video, showing how to download, install, and use legtool with a…
pygazebo 3.0.0-2014.1
Yesterday I pushed the release of the newest version of pygazebo to github, 3.0.0-2014.1 . This version has two big changes, the first is that I’ve updated all the message bindings for gazebo 3.0.0, which gets two new messages, CameraCmd and SphericalCoordinates. The second, and larger change, is a switch from eventlet to trollius for asynchronous coroutine operation. 
 trollius is an…
Savage Solder AVC 2014 Results
AVC 2014 has come and gone! Savage Solder placed 2nd in the doping class this year, with two of three successful runs. The first run ended after about 5 feet when the replacement ESC seemed to overheat after being left on for too long before the starting line. The second run was flawless, hitting the hoop and the ramp. The third run was nearly perfect, only missing the hoop. 
 Congrats to all…
The Mech Moves!

 
 

 This video shows some gaits for our Mech Warfare entrant, tentatively named “Super Mega Microbot”. First there is a slow statically stable gait, then a faster two leg at a time gait. 
 Technically, it has been walking for a couple of weeks, but this is the first time with the actual aluminum machined chassis plates, so that it makes for a nice video. All the…
Mech progress...
A few pictures from the in-progress mech build… 
 
 Aluminum chassis plates 
 
 

 
 
 Lower chassis with some boards populated 
 
 

 
 
 Mockup assembly of chassis minus turret and computer 
 

Updated baseboard for Savage Solder
One of the improvements we made for this year’s Savage Solder entry into the Sparkfun AVC (and maybe other competitions, I’m looking at you Vecna Robot Race ), is an updated baseboard. Our old baseboard was a Teensy 2.0+ soldered onto a hand-built protoboard and then wired up to an external IMU mounted on the front of the chassis. For fun, I decided to replace that board with a more…