Steve Dunn
30 Nov 04, 01:46 PM
Over the last 12 weeks a group of six high school students in year 10 attending the Australian Science and Mathematics School (ASMS) have completed a project in robotics. This was done under the peer mentoring program, an initiative of the 3 Universities here in South Australia and presented at Clipsal Integrated Systems (CIS) here in Adelaide. The ASMS is a part of UniSA and is based at the Flinders University campus. It is a full-time secondary school with a strong bias towards the sciences where it is seen that students will be attracted to technology and engineering through such projects and interaction with local industry.
The students have built a kit-form robot and have designed an interface program to connect it to C-Bus. A C-Bus network cable attaches to a C-Bus Serial Interface Module built into the robot. Staff at CIS provided assistance with the C-Bus Interface and the Protocol.
The Interface program written by the students using CoreChart Graphical Icon Assembler from elabtronics receives and interprets C-Bus messages so that group addresses can be used to control the movement of the robot: forwards, backwards, turn left, turn right. The robot control program can also send messages to operate other devices connected to a C-Bus network.
After the student presentation Jason Gerard, Engineering Manager here at CIS, demonstrated how the robot could also be controlled when the C-Bus network is connected to the recently launched C-Bus Wireless gateway and other Wireless units.
It was then demonstrated that the robot could be controlled at a distance over the Internet with a program using C-Gate and connected to C-Bus via a CNI.
The students declared the project had been a complete success and had shown them how technologies and academic subjects can be used together to solve a problem. They saw this as more than just a school exercise with an obvious practical use being the basis of an automated C-Bus Enabled robotic vacuum cleaner. Jason thought the ideal end use of this project would be a robot to bring him a beer from the fridge :) .
The students have built a kit-form robot and have designed an interface program to connect it to C-Bus. A C-Bus network cable attaches to a C-Bus Serial Interface Module built into the robot. Staff at CIS provided assistance with the C-Bus Interface and the Protocol.
The Interface program written by the students using CoreChart Graphical Icon Assembler from elabtronics receives and interprets C-Bus messages so that group addresses can be used to control the movement of the robot: forwards, backwards, turn left, turn right. The robot control program can also send messages to operate other devices connected to a C-Bus network.
After the student presentation Jason Gerard, Engineering Manager here at CIS, demonstrated how the robot could also be controlled when the C-Bus network is connected to the recently launched C-Bus Wireless gateway and other Wireless units.
It was then demonstrated that the robot could be controlled at a distance over the Internet with a program using C-Gate and connected to C-Bus via a CNI.
The students declared the project had been a complete success and had shown them how technologies and academic subjects can be used together to solve a problem. They saw this as more than just a school exercise with an obvious practical use being the basis of an automated C-Bus Enabled robotic vacuum cleaner. Jason thought the ideal end use of this project would be a robot to bring him a beer from the fridge :) .