Spirit Week:
In case you haven't have the faintest clue what spirit week is, it is a week where there is full blown competition between all four grade levels within our highschool. Currently I am part of the 2014 grade group as a sophmore currently. For all the years our school has had spirit weeks, we have always defeated the grade 2012, this will be the last year for 2012 to win Spirit Week. Thus the more important it is for us to defeat 2012. Last year I worked on the bulletin board, which is where each grade level compete in having the best bulletin board. We came in 2nd place for that bulletin board, FYI, I worked on the lighting components.
This year I'm looking for more ways we can defeat/intimidate 2012. For background information, our school contains multiple TV's throughout the score to provide information. I thought that maybe I could use these TV's to boost our grade's morale as well as decrease the other grade's morale. I thought that the best way to get these TV's to display information that I want is to interrupt the video signal to the TV. Thus I decided to use the MAX7456 "http://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=max7456&what=products" chip to overlay text onto the video source. Thus allowing people to still get information as well as seeing the message. My target are the TV's in the lobby since it's the most public place. The system would be able to receive wireless commands thus it would be undetectable on the field until activated during Spirit Week.
My secondary objective is to hack our Upper Gym's scoreboard. Since there will be consistent Spirit Week Assembly, I thought that I could probably also hack into those scoreboards by interrupting the signal. Through some research, I found out that our school has these scoreboards, "http://www.nevco.com/products/product_details.php?cat=Scoreboards&id=216&subcat=Basketball", I figured that if I could locate the wireless receiver, I could then place an arduino to interrupt this signal. Sometimes obeying commands from the actual scoring machine, then sometimes obeying my commands. With this, this would guarantee that everyone will see 20:14 however it would be slightly more complicated since the communication protocol used by these scoreboards are undocumented. While the primary objective is more doable, there is less chance for others to see it since people usually just walk by these screens.
ROV:
For ROV, I'm in charge of designing and programming the control system of the ROV. Last year I developed a system that utilizes the PS2 controller to control the ROV, (with the help with this library "http://www.billporter.info/playstation-2-controller-arduino-library-v1-0/") However the limitations with this system was that it had little to no sensor inputs. Furthermore there was really no other features.
Thus this year, I'm planning on designing a custom PCB to house an atmega2560 chip with sensor capabilities as well as self adjusting buoyancy. The details of this design would be elaborated in a dedicated post later however I'm working on the 2nd gen and 3rd gen system right now. The only difference the 3rd gen would have compared to the 2nd gen would be the integration to the ROV.
VEX:
In VEX, we attended the Pan Pacific VEX competition last year and did pretty well, #23 out of #104. However with World Championships in a couple months, as well as the fact that we will be representing the whole of Taiwan. The pressure is on us to fix all the problems that went wrong. In VEX, I'm the mechanical engineer, I'm in charge of stabilizing and implementing new designs into our current robot. We are planning on utilizing an entirely new drivetrain based on the Planetary Gear System. Hopefully we will do well at World Championships. I will keep you guys posted on progress made on our robot.
FRC:
FRC is a completely new robotics program at our school. It is also the most advanced one for High Schools, however due to the fact that I'm already involved in two other robotics teams at our school. I cannot completely participate in this team. Thus I'm unofficially helping our FRC team with the control system as well. There will be less frequent posts on this matter as I will not be able to make every one of the meetings.
And thats all for the projects! There will be even more details in project specific posts!
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