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Happy May the Fourth! May the Fourth be with you! This May we celebrate Star Wars Day on May 4th. In case you were wondering, May the fourth has nothing to do with George Lucas, Disney, or anything like that. It is a pure fan initiative, probably started because May the Fourth sounds a heck of a lot like May the Force. May the Fifth or May the Sixth (when we celebrate it on element14, alternately referred to as Revenge of the Fifth or Revenge of the Sixth, is another made up fan initiative that celebrates the Sith side of the force. In honor of those two dates we've also created the following polls:
- Project14 | Attack of the Drones: What's Your Favorite Jedi Droid?
- Project14 | Attack of the Drones: What's Your Favorite Sith Droid?
Those aren't the only two days of significance for Star Wars fans. Star Wars debut released on May 25th, 1977 and introduced the world to a longtime ago in galaxy far, far away. The world hasn't been the same since. We honor these special dates in May for Star Wars fans with this roundup of some of our favorite Star Wars projects. We also hope they inspire you to build your own Attack of the Drones project and submit it by Geek Pride Day on May 25th, also the actual birthday of Star Wars!
Fixing R2D2's Brains by Sean_Miller
Sean_Miller built his famous R2D2 droid with help from the gang at Astromech.net, a forum for droid building enthusiasts. He credits that along with The Ben Heck Show which showing him everything he needed to know about mechelectronics! Recently, his R2D2 ceased to continue working properly so he does a Ben Heck style teardown and discovery to see what went wrong!
The autonomous dome automatically blinks his lights and opens his panels in pseudo random fashion. However, recently, we noticed that after a few minutes, his panels would no longer open as designed and one of his front lights (the Process State Indicator) no longer behaved properly. The servos would just stutter and not open fully. For the light, it should light up in red, blue, or scroll from one color to the other. Instead it is either off for long periods of time or fully on with both the red and the blue making it look solid magenta. This started after I added an additional white LED to his front holoprojector.
Recently, his R2D2 ceased to continue working properly. Among other things, the panels no longer opened as designed and one of the front lights didn't work properly. So he channels his inner Ben and does a Ben Heck style teardown and discovery to see what went wrong. He narrows the root cause of the erratic behavior and summarizes some of the most common things to consider when troubleshooting erratic behaviors with Integrated Circuits. Like the maestro himself, he goes in and fixes him!!!
Stormtrooper Pi Radio by ninjatrent
Just about everything on the pi zero w has been wrapped in Kapton tape to prevent short circuits. Pinouts from the MAX98357A have been directly soldered to the pi zero w. A detailed tutorial on installation and configuration of this I2S Class D Amp can be found at https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-max98357-i2s-class-d-mono-amp/overview . On the 16GB microSD the most recent Raspbian Stretch Lite has been installed. https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/raspbian/
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Arduino Powered MSE-6 (Mouse Droid) by jomoenginer
This project won the top prize in the Open Arduino competition so that right there tells you its not an ordered list. Project14 chose to celebrate its birthday by celebrating Arduino Day with an Open Ended Arduino competition while also paying homage to the 25th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope. If memory serves correct, jomoenginer discovered he was the Grand Prize winner the same night he took his daughter to a Star Wars Movie. The alignment of all these events was the Arduino Powered MSE-6 (a.k.a. Mouse Droid). For those of you who are not familiar, this is the little wheeled droid that Chewy roared at causing it to run off scared in A New Hope. Apparently, there is a whole Mouse Droid Builders group and many examples of how to build this but most seem to be Radio Controlled. His intent was to create a completely autonomous MSE-6 that can self navigate an area, as well as, go to a designated location. Based on Star Wars lore, these were maintenance droids used to perform minor repairs or as messenger bots which were voice activated to open and deliver a private message. His version would include WiFi (and/or Bluetooth) where the Droid could be accessed remotely and given instructions for its next task. To do this he set up a Mouse Droid webpage that was hosted on the Arduino Yun. He was able to send a message to the Yun TFT screen, play the Mouse Droid sounds as well as control the droid by moving it Forward, Backward, Left, Right and Stop. He added the ping sensor to the front but didn't use the sweep servo due to space. To create the body of the Mouse droid he used black foam board. This was cheap and easy to work with, although he did some work to get the shape he was looking for. He took a few sheets and cut the individual pieces he needed. After hot cluing the pieces together, the Mouse Droid shape started to take form. With the chassis and the body together, it was time to put the guts (electronics) in the Droid. This included the Arduino Yun, Ardiuno UNO, Seeed TFT Screen, Speaker, 7.2 to 5 volt regulator, Steering servo, Photon Speed 2 Motor, and ESC.
The Making of R2D2 - The Force on Wheels by Sean_Miller
When connormiller was around six, Sean_Miller told him that when he was his age, he always wanted to build an R2D2. He would look at tree stumps and imagine how he could cut it up into his shape. So, he and his son did a Google search to see if anyone else ever had that crazy idea. To his surprise, he found a forum on Yahoo Groups just for building R2. A guy in Australia was leading the charge since 1999. He had grown a community of 5000 around the world by 2010. As he researched, he immediately became attracted to the coding of the mechelectronics of the build. It was also the period he found the Ben Heck Show. He had programmed for leisure since he was 10, so now applying programming to control hardware was super fun. For over a year, he did nothing but learn about the Arduino, Netduino, proximity switches, servos, and motor controllers. Autodesk Fusion didn't exist, but he found Blender. It was, and still is, the hardest software I ever learned - but it is an amazingly powerful, free tool to substitute for 3D CAD once you learn it. After 3 years, he had a great movie prop. Not every body detail was finished, but they had enough to apply some programming and microcontroller skills. Ben Heck taught him how to make his own PCB. So, using Eagle, they designed the PCB shields to control R2's motor drivers using XBee radios. This allowed for the control to fit in his pocket. His first true circuit was in 2013 when he made a voltage regulator circuit.
| The Making of R2D2 - The Force on Wheels | |
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Sean_Miller did a Show & Tell on a Project14 livestream of his R2D2 The Force of Wheels (a happiness machine) that included recorded video footage of the building process and commentary:
Size Matters Not - An R2D2 Story by dougw
R2D2 is a monumental icon regardless of its physical size - that has meaning for a large number of people - one of the most popular characters who has no speech. dougw has been planning for quite a while to build an R2D2, but every time he took a concrete step towards that goal it seemed to look harder to achieve something reasonable. This entry is using A Question of Scale as an excuse to move this mini R2D2 project out of the planning stage and into a build phase. It is great to finally get around to another project from my bucket list. This is definitely a scaled down version of R2D2.
| Size Matters Not - An R2D2 Story | |
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R2-D2 Arcade Live by balearicdynamics
The insane idea was to set-up the PiCade for live-action, controlling the droid in a Star Wars simulated environment. To accomplish the task balearicdynamics had in mind the live image of the droid should be projected in a Star-Wars-like virtual environment inside the PiCade screen: the best solution is creating a chroma-key (also called green screen) to extract the foreground from the background of every image using OpenCV. Using the frame subtraction features of the library it is almost easy to do; to be absolutely certain that the project can reach the next step was installing OpenCV to run in the Python environment. Maybe it was his lucky day as the OpenCV installation was perfect without issues.
A well-done and inspiring example of how to approach the chroma-key with OpenCV on the Raspberry Pi in Python is described in the excellent work Subtracted Reality by Arnaud Coolsaet.
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Lego Darth Vader reviews your code by Fred27
If any of you write code for a living, then you'll probably be familiar with Continuous Integration. This is where any code that you check in under source control is automatically checked out on a build server, it's compiled and any tests (you do write unit tests, don't you?) are run. This code is often deployed to a test server for anyone who wants to - such as a QA team - to check it out. Most professional development follows this procedure. If you're really ahead of the game then this may even be deployed automatically to production. Everyone starts out enthusiastically and code is kept in top condition. If a test fails the usual path is for an email to go out to the person who broke the code or the team that is responsible for it, and someone gets right onto it. Broken code is rare and fixed quickly. However, things can start to slip. They had this problem. As teams gets bigger and the codebase gets bigger and more complicated a lot of people have this problem. The solution to this problem would be to make sure we can see that things are going wrong. More importantly, if you know that your boss can also see things are going wrong then you'll make sure it's fixed quick! The solution to this is that you make Darth Vader your boss!
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Star Wars
R2D2 Uses the Force with XBee RF Virtual Wires by Sean_Miller
This project deep dives into the custom controller Sean_Miller and connormiller built for their life size R2D2. It documents their quest for the Holy Grail of R2D2 RF Control - The Incognito Controller. The original 1977 Star Wars R2D2 as well as many droids built today by the AstroMech.net(1) community use old school RC Controllers to control their droids. These controllers are the off-the-shelf ones you see folks using for their RC airplanes and trucks. They are very reliable, the most affordable option, and have fail safe tech built-in.
Unfortunately, the classic RC Control takes away all the magic that is Star Wars. There is nothing that screams “It’s just a big toy!” more than having a 47 year old man holding a box with a 3 foot long antenna with a big dopey smile on his face standing nearby. Also, by themselves, they aren't smart - most designs go from the RC receiver straight to the motor drivers of the droid. One bump of the stick or loss of line of site in a crowd and someone's getting hurt.
So, when they built their droid and explored their controller options, they arrived at an RF technology solution that essentially simulates virtual wires over very long distances. With it providing multiple virtual analog, digital, and Pulsed Width Modulation (PWM) signals, they can tie the receiver to a microcontroller to design in safety interlocks - true smart control versus the dumb traditional RC control. Also, the tech is small enough to make a circuit that fits in your pocket. With it being hidden from the crowd, it creates that movie magic feeling getting the kids (and parents) to scream “That’s a real R2!”.
That tech, they found all the way back in 2015, was XBee by Digi International. This write-up will give you some insight and design files for your own RF/Virtual Wire control projects as well.
| Star Wars R2D2 Uses the Force with XBee RF Virtual Wires | |
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Holiday Special 20: The Learning Stone by jkutzsch:
You knew something with Baby Yoda had to show up somewhere in this announcement? Didn't you?
Around the various Holidays jkutzsch enjoys creating little projects that match the theme of that specific Holiday, Spooky around Halloween, Spring/Life around Easter, Hearts/Candy/Love around Valentines, Star Wars around May 4th, Winter/Christmas around Christmas, etc... For this project he tried to imagine something that wasn't limited to a season or a specific Holiday but more along the lines of Giving with the potential to continue giving throughout the year and into the future.
With his daugher, Makenna by his side for every episode of Mandalorian, like the rest us they have fallen in love with the little character formerly known as The Child, AKA Baby Yoda, now Grogu. In fact, his daughter's biggest desire for a Christmas present was a Baby Yoda, not an ugly one, but a cute one!
So of course now he was now intrigued in regards of how to tie this together into a Gift for his Daughter and a Project for E14. Thank you sharing your awesome holiday project with us jkutzsch ! I think I can speak on behalf the entire community and say this past season of the Mandalorian was epic!!!
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