CCNY Hackathon and Workshop

Over the last two Fridays, a collective of CCNY science groups, the Clubs of Grove, held a microcontroller programming training workshop and hackathon in the Steinman Building. During the training session, students went through an hour-long training presentation and then were assigned different tasks to program and build.

Students were broken up into teams to work on their tasks. Building tasks started simple, and then increased in difficulty. For instance, students had to use a photoresistor to control the brightness of an LED. However, even starting with these simple tasks gave students a chance to learn about electronics prototyping hardware like breadboards, through-hole resistors, LEDs, and other sensing components.

 

Eventually teams had to figure out how to use more sophisticated components like ultrasonic sensors, temperature sensors, and different types of motors. It was a crash course in prototyping and programming. No experience was necessary to participate, and there were things to do for makers of all skill levels.

 

The following Friday, February 27th, there was a hackathon, in which teams were assigned build a project in response to a theme. The theme was “home improvement,” and the competition was fierce, merciless, and fun, of course.

The team of Yours Truly contemplated several types of home improvement projects. First we ruled out trying to do “obvious” projects, like using sensors to turn on lights, using a temperature sensor to control apartment heat, and other projects we thought others would think of.

Eventually, we decided that a refrigerator was the device in the home that consumed the most energy, and it would be useful to create a more energy efficient refrigerator. Our fridge would have many energy-saving features. First, it would be connected to a wall of the apartment adjacent to the outdoors, so it would be able to use cold air directly in the refrigeration chambers, when the air outside was cold enough. For instance, in the suburbs where people have garages, many people store food in their cold garages in the winter. Free refrigeration!

Also, our fridge would have separate compartments for refrigerating food. For instance, is your fridge “full” all of the time? Perhaps you only need half the space in your fridge to chill all your food. In our fridge, the main compartment would be broken up into three different areas. The shelf of each compartment would also be pressure sensitive, so that if there was no food in that compartment, the compartment would not be cooled, thereby saving energy. Also, each compartment base would rotate to allow uses to evenly distribute their food for proper chilling. And finally, to open each compartment, the user would only have to open a small door, maybe 1/3 the size of a full fridge door. This would allow less cool air to escape during each opening.

It’s a refrigerator. Can’t you tell?

The competition building a disco house.

Each room is triggered with sensors to activate a lighting system. Prototyping cardboard courtesy of Domino’s Pizza.

 

 

In the end, we came in second place. We lagged behind in points for “Business Potential” and Team 3/4/2’s home security system with “Intruder Rave Alert” beat us out. Well, hey, there’s always next build!

 

 

Meet FIRST Robotics: Interview with Qing Tian Chen

CCNY FIRST Robotics: Explain why you chose to study electrical engineering.

Qing Tian Chen: I feel that engineering is a career that makes interesting things happen for the future. Engineers make fascinating stuff like robots and artificial hearts, and I feel that by becoming an engineer I can get involved with developing these technologies. For instance, it’s interesting to get involved with 3D printing. In the early 2000s this technology hardly existed, but now it’s a technology we work with in FIRST Robotics.

CCNY: Growing up, did you have any family members or friends that inspired you to become an engineer?

Chen: In China, I grew up with my grandparents in Fujian near a big factory that they worked in. My grandfather didn’t have an engineering degree, but he was like an electrical engineer. He had a workshop, and growing up I’d play with surplus manufacturer buttons and parts. This first introduced me to engineering. Then I immigrated to America. In high school, I entered the FIRST Robotics competition and became inspired to do robotics. In the competition I made a robot that could play basketball, and I won the championship. After that, our group went to the national competition in St. Louis. This was a big moment for me to get involved with robotics.

CCNY: You are a junior at CCNY in the Electrical Engineering department. Can you tell us one or two memorable moments you’ve had at City College?

Chen: The most enjoyable course I’ve taken was the first electrical engineering lab. We learned about integrated circuit chips and we used our ICs to build a digital clock. I was proud of myself when I made the clock work. It was cool to create something.

CCNY: Tell us why you continue to be interested in robotics.

Chen: There are a lot of new technologies today, but we still need to think of ways to use these technologies to benefit our lives. I feel that robotics will increasingly become part of our lives in the future. For instance, in offices, there may no longer be secretaries. Instead a robot will file folders and find data. Companies like Amazon also use robotics. They use quadcopters to deliver packages.

CCNY: Do you have any personal philosophy about building? Do you have advice to those going into robotics?

Chen: If you want to build a robot, you must be familiar with the basic stuff, for instance, basic circuits and coding. In our club, we learn how to make Arduino hardware and chips control motors. Eventually, after practicing, building a robot is pretty easy. You just put all the different parts of the project together.

However, after building the hardware for a robot, you must program it. Programming is really the brain of the robot. For the same design or robot, the programming makes a difference. You can make the robot more efficient with better code.

CCNY: Are you more interested in coding or hardware?

Chen: I’m a mix. Some days I’m more into mechanical aspects of robots, and then some days I’m more into coding. These days all engineers require coding skills.

CCNY: I know that you went to Germany for a robotics research program. Tell us about your experience.

Chen: I studied at Aachen University of Applied Sciences, in Aachen, Germany. We learned about a system called ROS, Robotics Operating System. It is a middleware that connects your computer with the hardware of the robot. The university built the robot for us. It was a rover. It used microcontroller and an RGB camera that could sense the depth of an image.

Our professor would give a presentation of a topic, and in the afternoon we’d practice programming the robot. First, we learned about the operating system. Then we practiced programming a rover, which was like the one NASA sent to Mars, but a simpler version. Then we learned how to program it and control it using a joystick. We also learned about its camera, which could detect QR codes stored with information that let the rover know its location. Finally we used the camera and distance sensor to program the rover to make more complex movements. On the last day of the program we had a robotics competition between our different teams.

CCNY: What is one skill or challenging area in robotics that you want to learn more more about?

Chen: The most challenging part of designing a robot is developing an interesting idea. Right now I’m working on a research project to build a robot to go into a nuclear canister that has nuclear waste inside it. The canister is surrounded by a concrete wall, and there is a narrow gap for the robot to try and fit through to do an inspection. The most challenging part is coming up with ideas about how to build the robot. Maybe you could build a climbing robot that could suction to the walls. Or, maybe you could have the robot place a device on top of the canister to drop inside an do the inspection. It depends on your ideas and how you want to build the robot. The ideas are really the most important part. The coding and building — you can Google all the answers, but you need to have good ideas, and you must have the intuition to come up with them.