C-Bus ? School students ? Robots

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 .

 

Good work

Steve
Good luck to you guys/girls - this smart stuff is only limited by your imagination
with your wildest dreams coming to life before you know it.
Remember all things are possible it just takes time.


dave

 

That's the way to energy management ?! only kidding... take it to a high kids !

 

isn't getting a robot to get you a beer good energy management?

Great stuff Guys & Girls... our industry shall go on after all.

 

It's good for managing you own personal energy....