NI Labview is apparently much more powerful than I have previously given it credit. Some students were able to design, model, prototype, simulate, and eventually BUILD a functional SEGWAY in 3 months. I wonder if they will go into competition with Dean Kamen for Segway sales A direct quote from the video:
“We were able to impliment… A complex project… Without delving into the low-level implementation subsystems like TCP/IP communications and Micro-controller development and programming…”
I fully understand why hand-coding everything can be beneficial… However, after seeing some students make a flipping segway out of Labview, It makes me want to learn! If anybody else can find some cool Labview videos, link us up!
On another note, they used the cRIO and it’s standard components to build this segway… This thing is POWERFUL!!.. Abnormally FAST… It can go as fast as KENYANS… People will watch it and think it’s KENYAN… Maybe it will be deported back to KENYAAA… ((http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs))
It’s not broken here, but this is a link to a more main page:
You must navigate to Academia->Watch Students Use LabVIEW to Create Segway-Inspired Machine (last link) http://www.ni.com/labview/whatis/
I also just found a youtube video of a similar contraption running with an NXT controller.
That demo blew away the crowd - and Dean was our keynote speaker the very next day… so that NI Week was full of balancing goodness! We actually had a balancing NXT brick in the NI booth in Atlanta as well as a mini balancing cRIO bot.
I want to challenge teams to use just two wheels, but no one takes me seriously!
While this is a very cool project, and the students that developed it are rightful to be proud of their work, it is worth pointing out that this capability is far from unique to the NI platform. For example, two years ago Benge Ambrogi built a similar self-balancing device (I am being very careful to NOT call it a “Segway”) in a few weekends.
The controller he used? The VEX RC (yeah, the same one that we already have, er uh um, used to have, in FVC, ah, uhm, I mean FTC).
-dave
To quote Arthur C. Clarke, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Our team is undergoing a similar segway project and one of the first ideas was to use the VEX controller. I thought it was pretty strange, but then again, I’ve never worked with Vex before.
I’ve seen this done with the Lego RC (non-NXT), which is significantly less powerful than any of the other controllers mentioned.
Of course, it was programmed procedurally in NQC–the graphical Mindstorms software implementation just wasn’t efficient or powerful enough to get the task done.
A direct quote from the video:
