MUROC 2011

It's been 3 days since me and my friends got back from MUROC 2011 which took place at UNIMAP, Perlis. But the memories are still vivid. I really enjoyed having all of my team mates, college mates and even new friends there. Seriously the event was so fun even though we lost and by lost I mean we only managed to get 7th place out of 12 teams, I'm still glad I had the chance to participate in this event and be part of it.

I've been busy for the last few months preparing for our fire fighting robot but now I'm glad that it's all over and it ended in a happy way that me and my team mates got a lot of experiences, knowledge and the most precious thing is that we build stronger relationship among each others.

I'm lucky to have such an awesome team mates, Bro Mail a.k.a laoshi (my laoshi is my senior), and fellow friends who are always there by my side. We went through a lot of things, sharing almost every single thing; happiness, sadness etc. I'm thankful that even when I had my emotional breakdown moment, all of them were there to support me. Not to forget, an infinite thanks to laoshi. He's one of a kind and being kindhearted he is, he helped us a lot (like A LOT). He was there from the very beginning till the end and we learned a lot from him too. Xie xie laoshi!! In a nutshell, all of them are super duper AWESOME. (^_^)

For fire fighting robot, 1st place: UPM, 2nd: UITM S.A and 3rd and 4th place: UNIMAP. For our university, we tested our robot in our own field, the robot's movement was pretty okay but once we were in the real field, the problem occurred. We had few problems with our robot movement since the field we had in our lab was quite smooth as opposed to the real field in UNIMAP. Since we're using encoder to count the rotation, once the robot moves on the rough terrain, it kinda affect the robot's movement. You know once the robot got stuck, it still increment the count of rotation and it will then affect the distance measurement thus the robot will make a wrong turn. We had problems with our sensors as well since we only used two IR sensors (due to our budget limitation) compared to other institutions, most of them used at least 5-6 sensors.

Over all, even though we lost, I'm glad that I joined this competition since everyone is really friendly there and I noticed this event is a whole lot different from ROBOCON. It's somewhat interesting to look at other institutions' robots, like how they built their robot, what kind of sensors they used, what kind of IDE etc. We managed to exchange some ideas here and there.
I think if time permits, we're gonna join this competition once again next year. We'll see later since we're graduating soon. Haha.

Despite of everything I said about how happy I was, deep down inside I'm quite disappointed with myself. At first, I managed to balance everything; classes, quizzes, fyp, Mandarin class, fire fighting robot etc but towards the end, I've become heedless. I've thrown away my responsibilities as a student. I skipped classes and quiz in order to finish the robot. It's my fault and now I'm trying to catch up everything that I've missed for the last 2 weeks. Wish me luck. ;)

Once again, I'm writing to say that I'll keep these memories forever. We had so much fun together. Thanks for those involved, those who offered support and encouragement, and thanks for the amazing journey. Love you guys..!! =)

Here's our fire fighting robot:

We used Pinguino as our IDE.

Can you spot the cute sticker there?

Here's my chance to promote my laoshi's company: UMMATECH

Go and check their site.. You can buy range of stuffs needed for your projects and you can even ask them for project consultation.

Here are rope climbing robots from our university:





And the rest are robots from other universities; UPM, UITM, USM and many more.

P/s: All photos credit to my team mates, Najlaa, Ean, Ain and Kawthar.

TRON Inspired

I think it looks kinda cool. But it's not easy to do it in a split second. Haha

I like TRON but haven't watch the sequel yet. I've watched the 1st TRON, the 1982 film. Haha I wasn't even born at that time but yeah you know with technology and stuff, you can simply download it or such to watch it.
In my case, I got it from my brother. Anyway, with TRON being the no.1 on the Box Office list with $43.6M, I figure maybe you guys wanna check the video. Haha.

For more details, you can check out this site:
http://ladyada.net/make/tronbag/

P.s: It's just about bag. xD

Physical world & Digital World

This is an old video (1 year ago) actually but the idea inside the video is amazing. He's an MIT student and is a creator of SixthSense which is quite similar to TelePointer developed by Steve Mann.
Regardless, the idea is so creative and genius. Try to watch the video and you'll know what I meant by that. =) Enjoy.

LED Matrix for Halloween

I'm excited when I read this post in Hack A Day website, 70 LED matrix in a Jack-o-lantern style. Well it's not because of Halloween's coming. I don't celebrate Halloween. Ngeh.

But because we had to do the exact same thing for our project sans the pumpkin of course. We have already submitted and presented the project. It was a project of 2 persons under the Digital System Design and Microprocessor Based System Subjects.

Here's how Hack A Day futuristic pumpkin look like displaying Happy Halloween in matrix sytle:

Pic Credit: Hackaday.com

Well if you want to see more or learn more, there's a tutorial at the site and video as well.

http://hackaday.com/2010/10/26/70-led-matrix-in-a-jack-o-lantern/

Who knows you might wanna do it for this coming Halloween. ;)

Here's what our project look like:

Well I don't have video of this one. Please note that we didn't purposely choose the LEDs in different color. We only used what were given to us. ;) We have to display our name and matric number.

See my name's there, Far..okay, it's Farah actually.

But you can't display it as a whole since that's only 6x12 LED matrix.

But if you put it in a marquee style, you can totally see it.

In HackADay site, they have used microcontroller to write the code. We only used Microp software, Easy68K. The coding is super long, so I'm not gonna put it in here. We need to use decoder as well, so we need to use one decoder of 3x8 74LS138 for the rows of 6 and 2 decoder of 3x8 74LS138 for the columns of 12.

P/s: Maybe it's a good idea to put our project in something like pumpkin. ;) It looks cute anyway!

Piano Stairs

Piano Stairs from Ibrahim Nergiz on Vimeo.

They called it 'The Fun Theory'.
Well if you ask me, I would definitely take this stairs everyday if they make it like this one.
I mean it looks cool and so much fun, I don't mind to try it..

What's the point of having technology if you don't want to use it right?
Escalators and elevators always beat stairs anyway.
But if they were to make stairs sound like piano, people will have the curiosity to try it once and even play with it just like in the video.
It will increase the numbers of people who will use stairs instead of elevator and escalator. ;)

Besides, whenever I take public transports like LRT, I always opt to use stairs instead of escalator or elevator. I don't know why but I love stairs.
But please note I don't take stairs to go to my daily classes. My classes are all at level 3 or level 4. I only take it if I'm super late, no time to wait for the elevator. ^-^


P/s: I'd love to try this piano stairs for fun, you know how much I love piano. ;)