Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

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This touches so closely on a recent anecdote that I must share.

The FIRST Robotics team I mentor just finished their season this past weekend. Something they did last-minute was add a GoPro to their grabber because they wanted to see some neat footage of it working, and maybe use it to improve the design or fix issues.

Then one of the students had the idea to just put it in real-time mode and watch it live from their phone. Which instantly became an invaluable tool for controlling the arm effectively. They couldn't live without it after that. I think it was against rules to have a wireless device, so they took the idea and applied it to a USB camera that fed to a video output on the drive computer.

I'm sure other teams already came up with this, but I was just so impressed to see that organic process happen with a bunch of 10th and 11th graders. They learned a practical example of all the buzzwordy things like "think outside the box" and "no idea is a bad idea" and "don't engineer everything, sometimes just throw ideas and see what sticks." I'm just so proud of them.

They’re in good company, NASA got the idea for all the cameras during the most recent Mars rover “descent and landing” mission from a GoPro.

> Deputy project manager Matt Wallace said the idea to put video cameras on board to document the rover's entry, descent and landing came after he bought his daughter a small sports camera that she wore in a harness while practicing gymnastics.

> "She did a back flip, and I don't know about you, but I cannot do a back flip," he said. "But when she showed me the video ... I had a glimpse into what it would be like if I could do a back flip. And that was the moment that inspired a phone call to my friend (Perseverance camera engineer) Dave Grohl, and that's what led to this system."

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/first-images-of-perseveranc...

That is a really lovely story; I'm glad you shared it.

I like these glimpses of the true joy and fun that can be had with the craft of engineering. Amidst the relentless barrage of bureaucracy that defines most modern SWE jobs, it's nice to know that there's still some good, pure engineering out there.

I actually feel jealous that the students get an engineering problem like this. By only having about 8 weeks from when the challenge is announced, they're forced to cut through bureaucracy. There is no Agile and project planning. There's just round-table discussions on what to design, a bit of CAD work to feel it all out, and then weeks of prototype, build, test, loop. It was so darn lean.

FRC was an incredible experience. Like you said, the fast pace round table discussions and develop as you go was a lot of fun and inspiring. The biggest takeaway for me was the positive energy and great sportsmanship I saw in every team and competition. Hope that still rings true 10+ years later. Coming from traditional sports and previously disconnected from the "nerds" and band kids, I came in with a very different headspace than I left with.

Thank you for mentoring!! I know every team needs all the mentorship they can get. I've thought about coming back too but cold feet so far.

Oh and a bit of fun technical story to relate to yours. Back then touch screens on consumer devices was still pretty new, I remember a couple kids on the team had the original Android and iPhone devices. A couple of years earlier I had followed an Instructables guide for a "touch" device with infrared/glass/webcam and in the process learned how cameras can see infrared after removing a filter. Then in my competition year there was a goal of autonomously interacting with some stage elements and this question of how do we do vision processing to make that work? Maybe it was implied somewhere and I don't remember the details anymore, but I immediately recalled that webcams can see infrared and the stage elements had reflective tape. So we butchered a webcam to remove the IR filter and add a near IR filter and then we slapped some IR LEDs on the front. Of course the software side (we used LabVIEW) was a whole other thing but the hardware side was captivating to the whole team and was a lot of fun to put together organically.

Other great memories of replacing 4 motors, soldering heavy gauge wires and all, 15 minutes before a match and walking around the pits with a deep cycle battery wired to a car AC transformer to keep my batteryless sponsor hand me down laptop running.

I love the stories you shared. When I was a team member 20 years ago (oh my god it was 20 years ago...), we did all kinds of wild hacky stuff. Our entire robot chassis was made from PVC and we felt super clever using the hollow tubes for cable management.

These days they put QR codes all over the field for vision processing. It's absolutely !@#$ing wild to see what some of the better robots can do in 15 seconds of full autonomy.

We also had a laptop that ran off a car battery =D Though we could afford a new laptop this year, so we finally don't need to use it as much.

>>[...] a bit of CAD work to feel it all out [...]

Which CAD program are your 10th & 11th graders using? It seemed that most well-resourced school robotics clubs try for AutoCAD through Autodesk's educational access program but always have to re-apply every year to determine eligibility.

They use OnShape I believe. I think it's something the school board has a license for, and it's 100% through the browser, which makes it a lot more accessible both at school and at home. We're also one of the least-well-resourced school robotics clubs you'll ever meet. The mere existence of the team and having a robot that leaves the starting line in a competition is a resounding success.

Our FIRST team (4027) also uses OnShape ... Some of the parts are even sent directly to a water jet cutter!

Why Autocad and not Inventor? And, why not Fusion 360?

My informal survey was based on anecdotal information. Since Inventor, Fusion360 and AutoCAD are all under the Autodesk umbrella it could be that many school teams/clubs lumped them all under "AutoCAD". That being said, I did hear that Fusion360 can be problematic with the cloud-based (always-on) emphasis. No mentions of Inventor, and I was also surprised that nobody mentioned Solid Edge Community Edition either.

Thanks for sharing - That is a warm and fuzzy story. It is nice to hear people have access at that age; I certainly didn't.

I don’t know whether you’re discussing FIRST Tech Challenge or FIRST Robotics Competition, but I know that at our team’s competition they specifically asked if we had any GoPros in real-time mode and the remote software prevented viewing any cameras and driving at the same time. Otherwise I think this strategy would have been a huge help to us!

FRC. Yeah, they're understandably concerned about what happens if every single robot has 1 or 2 extra wireless communications channels. They announced at least once to the audience to turn off any hot spots as they're getting tremendous noise and channel swapping for the RoboRios.

If you use a RoboRio and wpilib, there's first class support to feed USB camera into the Rio, through the official match/field wifi for your robot, and to your laptop's Game UI.

They also specifically limit teams to low bandwidth to guarantee quality of service to each robot.

The FRC camera rabbit hole is deep - we run a fully custom gstreamer setup this year, plus a full ML/hybrid vision pipeline and two Apriltags cameras on Photonvision.

In years past, we even designed our own camera scheme with an implicit surfaces calculator so we could drive with/ship wireframes.

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