"Spare Parts" in theaters nationwide Jan. 16!

[Frank Neuperger]

Team 0x27 is best described as a community robotics team.

All but one student that helped with the build were alumni of FRC 39 or the current FTC 4314 team. Several have helped with FRC 842 as well.

Team 0x27 was created in 2008 to compete in NURC in the summer. There was a Team 39 policy at the time that did not allow us to use any connection to that team number or name for summer activity. So the programmers among you will understand why we picked the name Team 0x27.

A bit over half of the students that helped with the 5 week design/build for the film ROV are studying engineering at ASU or ASU/Polytech. 4 have have now graduated.. One is still in high school and will attend ASU next year.

Team Ox27 competed with great success in 2008, 2009 and 2010 NURC with ROV builds in ridiculously short periods of time. In 2012 they crushed the Sparkfun AVC event record. There are a number of 0x27 videos on YouTube.

We will post a summary of the design build process for the Cornell ROV for the film as well as a few pictures during fabrication.

Frank

[Frank Neuperger]

A few pictures of Team Ox27 working on the movie ROV as well as a bit of the development story.

We were approached by Fredi in early summer 2013 regarding building an ROV to play one of the top contenders. As it turns out, the final school name for our ROV was not finalized till we were actually on set doing final cosmetic touches on the ROV's.

Additionally, The Typewriter Repairmen (associated with Nerds FRC 1726) as well as Falcon robotics (FRC 842) would also be building ROV's for the film.

The requirement was for each group to build 2 identical ROV's to play the top teams. One would be a spare as to not hold up filming if there was a failure on the one that was in use. Falcon would also build "Stinky" models at various levels of completion.

The special effects people had said they could only build prop ROV's that the divers would have to puppet. The 3 experienced build groups were approached because the film people wanted highly functional ROV's to give extra realism to the film. Because it was unprecedented not to have professional film industry builders to this, the insurer of the film would not sign off on the policy until they saw a demonstration of the ROVs in the water. It was a big plus that we had experience building highly functional machines with 6 week schedules before.


With filming to start in October 2013, We did not however get the go ahead till ~ last week of August. We expected the the game to be similar to the original 2004 game but were not 100% sure if there would be any added tasks for the movie. Those details were still being worked out. So we started designing a competition capable bot for the tasks that we knew. Typical stuff. Grabbing things, measuring temperature etc. The producers, director and production designer made a visit to Falcon Robotics in Phoenix to meet the ROV builders and brainstorm the game tasks and robot requirements. That session was great fun working with a critical mass of creative people.

On top of the functional requirements, the Production Designer for the film had aesthetic requirements that forced building larger ROV's than we would build for this type of event. They did not want the ROV's to be dwarfed by the 50 foot long submarine that would be the main prop for the game. Past ROV's that we built for NURC were ~ 18" x 24" x 12". These ROV's ended up 38 x 38 x 18".

We had never previously used graphics or paint for our competition ROV entries. We instead spent the time improving functionality. Yes, our past ROV's were really ugly. Not to say that other NURC teams did not have cool looking bots. The movie ROV;s however would have coordinated school colors graphics ... aesthetics. We underestimated how hard the production designer ( Rob Wilson King) would push on this to get it to his standards. The "Look" of everything in the film was Robb's responsibility.

Because I could not get back to PHX right away when we got the green light for the project, we basically had only ~5 weeks to get the ROV #1 designed and ready to ship for Oct 4, 2014. We had most of the ROV2 parts by that time as well.

After shipping ROV1, we worked for the next 2 weeks to finished ROV #2 to a higher level of aesthetics than ROV1. Then Borna and I drove it the ABQ set for filming. We spent a couple days on set getting both ROV's to the same level of updates and applying the Cornell cosmetics. We also had to make a physical addition that supported a plot element and this forced practice and learning the new handling characteristics of the ROV. We also built camera mounts for several other ROV's in the film.

With 5 degrees of freedom, a grabber and and some button enabled features, it took two of us to drive/control the robot for the film. The result was very smooth and precise.

The following pics are of some of the crew that built the ROV and you can see some of the parts that went into building it as well as a partial pic of the final product. The Cornell ROV can be seen briefly but clearly in the following videos.

For a moment,
You can see the robot at 0:18 and 1:47
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IthdmHTgmKw

Robot at 0:32
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXOLwIIHuCs

Robot at 0:31
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHylF2kjAJ8

Time lapse video of frame building.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yvutqczg23...Lapse.mp4?dl=0


Pics During fabrication:

I could not make the "embed photo" scripting work properly (using dropbox urls for the photo's) so a decent collection of pictures is here:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/tai3qqpby...PpHVV9rwa?dl=0


A time lapse of Team 0x27 building a NURC ROV from scratch in 17.5 hours.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv3hiGKKCic

[DavidGitz]

Very awesome movie. I had a question though. I'm assuming that the ROV that the team made was somewhat realistic, what was the need for the Digital Sidecar since they already had one of the old IFI boards which should more than enough I/O for their use. It also looked like the cable that they had to repair in one scene was going to the DSC, was that going to the IFI board? How did that work? Did you guys bit-bang a parallel port on the IFI board?

[MrForbes]

heh....the black case who's inside is shown in the movie, is a movie prop. It is not actually installed on a functional robot. The original 2004 Stinky used an IFI control system from a FIRST robot, with the robot controller in the black case, and the Operator Interface box on the shore control panel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnaV1Wg67Bo

The movie versions of Stinky have another enclosure inside the black case, and the black case is flooded. They use small speed controllers and a vEx signal splitter.

In case you didn't know it already, movies contain a lot of fakery. Most folks don't notice most of it. Most folks have no clue what all the parts in the black case in the movie actually do....every thing electronic is just a typical jumble of stuff to them, so when you're making a movie prop, you can just throw a jumble of stuff in there, and 99.99% of folks watching the movie will be satisfied that it really is the functional electronics to make a robot work!

Art is fun


edit: As an example of this, look at WALL-E, study him for a while, and tell me where the actuators are, that make him move.

[Christopher149]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

edit: As an example of this, look at WALL-E, study him for a while, and tell me where the actuators are, that make him move.

But as counterpoint, you actually get to see some of Baymax's actuators.

[DavidGitz]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

heh....the black case who's inside is shown in the movie, is a movie prop. It is not actually installed on a functional robot. The original 2004 Stinky used an IFI control system from a FIRST robot, with the robot controller in the black case, and the Operator Interface box on the shore control panel.

Ha, fair enough, I thought as much. Thanks!

[nixiebunny]

A great film! I thought the ending was a bit corny, as if such a thing could actually happen in real life. Oh, wait...

I was personally thrilled to see some of my creations in the movie, with at least bit parts. The Stanford and Duke ROVs were built by MrForbes, s_forbes and myself in 2009-2010 when we were the Typewriter Repairmen. The Duke one is shown on the URC wall sign as well. The Bit Buckets (4183) supplied an ROV named Tribble as an extra, but it didn't make the final cut. It is in one of the trailers for an instant.

[pikachuguy3389]

I saw the trailer before the game animation and instantly said, "i have to go see that".

[EricH]

I went to see it tonight, it's still getting a reasonable bit of audience where I went (~ 12-20 for an afternoon showing).

The folks sitting at the end of the row I was in were quite surprised at the story... so I naturally pointed them towards their local FRC team.

And yes, definitely a good movie.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by MrForbes

heh....the black case who's inside is shown in the movie, is a movie prop. It is not actually installed on a functional robot. The original 2004 Stinky used an IFI control system from a FIRST robot, with the robot controller in the black case, and the Operator Interface box on the shore control panel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnaV1Wg67Bo

The movie versions of Stinky have another enclosure inside the black case, and the black case is flooded. They use small speed controllers and a vEx signal splitter.

In case you didn't know it already, movies contain a lot of fakery. Most folks don't notice most of it. Most folks have no clue what all the parts in the black case in the movie actually do....every thing electronic is just a typical jumble of stuff to them, so when you're making a movie prop, you can just throw a jumble of stuff in there, and 99.99% of folks watching the movie will be satisfied that it really is the functional electronics to make a robot work!

Art is fun


edit: As an example of this, look at WALL-E, study him for a while, and tell me where the actuators are, that make him move.

You can't deny that movies/books/etc. don't inspire engineers to make some of the stuff seen in them, and driving development of new technologies. It's a two-way street. There are tons of examples of this happening. Robots being one of them. Also, hoverboards and a lot of field sensing stuff. Some of it is that a technical person will have a very basic idea of a technology, and artists use artistic license and do something with it, then that further inspires engineers to actually figure out how to do some of it. While a lot of technologies are fiction, people want them to be real, so it gets people thinking how it could actually be done.

[MrForbes]

Yup! STEAM is a neat thing.

(A is for art, if you're not familiar with the term)