Month: October 2018

Driverless Car workshops – a five week course

Digital Maker CIC recently completed two 5-week driverless car workshops in Aberdeen. Northfield academy’s Science Club & Transition Extreme After School Club each had an exciting and challenging set of workshops for children aged 12+. Digital Maker CIC believes that these workshops are a “first” for the UK. Both projects were funded by Aberdeen City Council’s “U-decide” (participatory budgeting project).

The participants learned about Machine Learning, Engineering & design of the 1:16th scale cars, raspberry Pi terminal commands, to interface with the cars, computers    & cloud computing interfaces and driving the remote-controlled cars.

Working in teams of four, the pupils were given tasks of constructing & managing their cars, “training” and improving their driving skills, as the better the car is driven, the better the Machine Learning model will be. The pupils could quickly train & then produce ML models (via cloud computing), giving exciting results, as the cars drove themselves around the 4m2 tracks we use. The pupils quickly learned that the better they drove the cars, the automated driving improved.

The teams also tried to add obstacles (orange cones) into the modelling, creating various results (success & failure), but, with more training & time, the pupils understood that their cars would “get better” with time.

We’d like to thank Northfield Academy & Transition Extreme Sports Ltd for their support & use of space, in order that we could run the workshops. We are working on extending the workshops to Aberdeenshire & eventually have a North East interschools competition for the Driverless Car technology.

If you’d like more information, or want your school to participate in this project, please do get in touch!

AwesomeTech@digital-maker.co.uk

Digital Maker CIC – CPD for the College Development Network

Digital Maker CIC had the privilege of being asked to run a robotics challenge workshop for the CDN (College Development Network Scotland) in Dundee & Angus College’s Gardyne campus on Friday 28th of September for over 20 College Lecturers.

Teams from all over Scotland joined us for a fun day, exploring, building & programming robots in order to compete in various challenges once the teams were ready. We gave each team a CamJam robotics kit with minimal worksheets / instructions and spent around 30 mins building the kits, using raspberry Pi Zeros & piTop Ceeds (to control / interface with the robot rover via  5 meter USB cable). the Edinburgh team took the initiative to make their rover wirelessly controlled, downloading & installing software through their own phone (extra points there!)

Once everyone had built & played with their rovers, controlling it via simple on-screen button & programmable interfaces (Custom Adapted Blockly by Digital Maker CIC), we then added a line detection sensor, giving the participants experience in electronics & GPIO use on the Pi Zero. The challenge was to create a line following algorithm using only 1 sensor & the Blockly interface, to get the team’s rover around a line path in the quickest time. There were a lot of different approaches, using repeat loops, “if statements” and more. One of the most elegant solutions was a simple algorithm by West Lothian College.

All teams produced line following algorithms with varying degrees of success, but, all teams were resilient & spent time honing their algorithms, trying various tweaks & fixes based on their observations, critical thinking & experimentation, which was great to see. The fastest line follower was under 1 minute, the longest (complete circuit) was just under 3 minutes.

Some teams managed to start exploring adding an ultrasonic distance sensor (HC SR04) to tackle the minimal maze we had brought along too, but, time had got the better of us, and after 6 hours of playing, experimenting, trying and learning, time was up!

We’d like to thank Kenji Lamb for organising the event & asking Digital Maker CIC to facilitate the workshop. We are planning to run a 2nd CDN Robotics CPD challenge with Kenji in 2019… so if you are interested, or want more information, please do get in touch!