Robotics in Costa Rica

[Sam Wilson]

LiCR,

I promised an update on our Robot Building in remote Guanacaste...

First off, we have begun!  ;-)  That is always the 1st step.  ;-)

With the Science Fair looming in our kinder, I rushed an order to get us some Robot parts up this way.  We've got no place near here to buy any sort of small electronics stuff, i.e. anything that isn't involved in repairing lavadoras, and we've got a 5 hour drive to the nearest EPA.  So after 2 nights of quick study and endless planning, I clicked submit on my order at RobotShop.com of the top 46 items we'd need to build a Robot.  We had heard that the Science Fair was going to be the 1st week of August, but nobody could confirm that date, so after being slightly more than halfway confident that we'd have enough components to build a mobile Robot that we could teach tricks for our Science Fair project, I went ahead and placed our order for motors, sensors, batteries, a micro-controller, and miscellany that surely we'd need like resistors and capacitors and wire.  I called the company to make sure that if at all possible they would ship everything in one box to simplify me getting it all to Costa Rica with minimal hassle.  A week later my Alert at Box Correos triggered that they had received a package of what I categorized as CIRCUITOS ELECTRONICOS hoping to hit the Aduanas lottery and only get hit with 13% import tax.  I sure didn't want them to focus on the LiPo rechargeable batteries buried within all my wires etc. and decide it should thusly be taxed as BATERIA RECARGABLE (42.38%.)  Anyway, 3 kilos worth or Robot ingredients arrived in Miami at the freight-forwarder's warehouse.  After deciding they really didn't want to try to figure out what to do with 46 little packages of buck converters, infra-red sensors and wheels, they decided CIRCUITOS ELECTRONICOS sounded just right to them.  However, of course such delicacies deserved to be better protected than the original shipper of such things who ships such things all the time had done, so for $11.50 extra they suggested we wrap the box in bubble-wrap.  How could I argue?  Only $11.50 extra to make sure the parts we needed to build our precious Rayo Pinky-Pie 7.0 Robot arrived safely?  A no-brainer...  Shipping 3 bubble-wrapped kilos of Robot parts: $33.55.

So far, we've got a $272.81 order of Robot parts from RobotShop.com plus $33.55 for Box Correos to repack and ship to Costa Rica and... I got no notice about the package arriving in Costa Rica nor clearing customs.  But we gauged it time to check, so we drove down the volcano to the nearest post office to check on things.  Sure enough, I spotted a medium-sized box on the shelf with a RobotShop.com logo on it and the post office clerk confirmed that our package had indeed arrived!  ¢28 mil later and we had what I hoped would be enough ingredients to build a 1st place winning Robot dubbed Rayo Pinky-Pie 7.0.  My box of Robot ingredients passed for CIRCUITOS ELECTRONICOS (13%) at Aduanas!!!  For those keeping tally, we're at pretty close to a 30% premium for living on the edge of the Costa Rican jungle.  That's better than for ballet slippers, and much better than for auto-parts.  I'm chuffed at only paying 30% more than an equivalent Dad in los EE.UU would have...  ¡Hurra!

"Why Rayo Pinky-Pie 7.0?" you ask?  Well... our 7 year old boy wanted to call our Robot Rayo after the red race-car in the Cars movie.  The 5 & 6 year old girls on our team wanted to call her Pinky-Pie.  The 7.0 because every time the 7 year old drew a picture of what our Robot should look like, he drew either a "7" or a lightening bolt -- I never was sure which.  As any software developer will tell you, 7.0 is much better than 1.0 and so it is, we start with version 7.0 of Rayo Pinky-Pie.  The next new Robot to grace our volcano in out-back Guanacaste, and maybe the first!

So far we have programmed a blinking light on our Arduino UNO micro-controller and each of us took turns programming how many times to blink before pausing.  Now all the rage is to ask Rayo Pinky-Pie 7.0 questions about things that one would be surprised such a nascent Robot would know: 

    ¿Cuantos años tiene Nico?        <blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink>  (7 blinks)    ¡Correcto!

    ¿Que es 5 más 2?        <blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink>  (7 blinks)    ¡Correcto!

    ¿Cuantos días tiene cada semana?        <blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink>  (7 blinks)    ¡Correcto!

That is one smart Bot I'm tellin' ya!  ;-)

Our plans are to teach our little fella (and our little human fellas) how to detect colors (TCS3200 sensor,) follow a line of black electrical tape on the floor (QTR-8RC LED array,) Avoid Obstacles / Find a Door (HC-SR04 ultrasonic range finder & Sharp IR sensor,) and precision walk-abouts (wheel encoders & odometry.)  Night #2 we attached motors and wheel encoders to a nice acrylic base and tonight we'll start to solder.  Things are going pretty well for a little STEM in the diet of our youngun's in el campo Guanacaste.  I think we'll have no choice but to take 1st place in the upcoming Science Fair competition which I now hear will be the end of setiembre.

"[Science] is more than a school subject, or the periodic table, or the properties of waves. It is an approach to the world, a critical way to understand and explore and engage with the world, and then have the capacity to change that world..."

— President Barack Obama, March 23, 2015

The trend is clear as is my job as papá to help our youngun's catch that wave:

Earlier this year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the national average wage for all STEM occupations was nearly double the national average for non-STEM occupations - ninety-three out of 100 STEM occupations had wages significantly above the national average.

Ride 'em Cowboy!  ¡¡Yee haw!!

--

Sam, in Guanacaste

[Marie Vigil McCain]

science  fair  was an enjoyable part for my kids at school along with

4G and the CA Midwinter  Fair.

if you didn't  live so far I would love to attend... 

MariAn

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[Sam Wilson]

MariAn,

It's a small country!  Come on up some time and see how the fly-over provinces live!  jajaja.  You can visit with our budding Robot Engineers and Gene can fix you up with some wonderful cheese.  In less than an hour out of the GAM you can no longer smell it.  By the time you hit the coast you will think you are in a different country.  As you cross into Guanacaste you will know for certain you are from all the smiling faces and the good manners.  We quit buying cheese from our favorite moto-dairyman and now only buy Gene Cheese.  It fries up well and he doesn't over do it with the salt like is so common around here.  Plus he doesn't try to max out his production by siphoning off all the cream to make natilla before making the cheese.  ¡Riquísimo es!  Our therapeutic thermal waters are the wonder of the world -- we've got a Blue Zone, don't you know?  ;-)

Gene wrote:

> Nice robot pics sam...

> R2d2...stand back...rayo pinkie has come to life!!!

Thanks, Gene!

     

Progress!!!  Technically we are not "standing" yet, but we have been officially declared alive by the family and all who were present in our sala last night...  We had a chance to neatly mount some of our stuff and therefore time for Show-n-Tell.  We are using a pair of "TT" gear motors and one of the common "Smart Car" acrylic bases on which to mount things -- so far we've mounted:

    Arduino UNO (microcontroller)

    2 x 7.4v LiPo 1000mAh (1 direct connect for UNO & Sensors, 1 via DC-DC converter for motors)

    2 x 6v "TT" gear motors, 1:48 ratio

    2 x 20 slot shaft encoders for odometry

    2 x Waveshare foto interrupters to read shaft encoders

    DFRobot 25W Step-down DC-DC converter (for 7.4v LiPo to 6v for motors)

    HC-SR04 ultrasonic range finder

    Hitec HS-422 servo motor (for sweeping our sonar range finder)

    Pololu TB6612FNG dual H-bridge for bidirectional control of 2 motors

Still to mount:

    Pololu QTR-8RC reflectance array (for line-follow and edge detection)

    TCS3200 color sensor (to have fun finding colored objects)

Finally our 1st good WOW!!! moment with the fam...  ;-)  We wired up the foto interruptors and the sonar servo motor and I loaded up a servo sweep program, then let'r rip!  Our foto interrupters have some nice red and green LED's that blink with shaft encoder disk readings.  The servo motor did nothing but hold the sonar sensor up high and sweep back and forth taking in the gaze of Rayo Pinky-Pie's new world.  It made for real showy flashing lights and a moving Robot "head" that sure looked life-like.  We really were just showing the family we actually could drive a motor with our little Robot brain for our 1st real show-and-tell.  Our 7-year old remembered our favorite 2 animals that get around using similar sonar echo object detection (dolphins & bats) and explained how echos work to both mamá and 'buela.

I got a chance to troubleshoot and overcome our 1st real challenge -- program upload errors.  Of course we never hit this when playing with the Arduino and a few things on a breadboard.  Finally I narrowed it down to the shaft encoder signals interfering with the USB Tx/Rx.  We've got them hooked to pins D0 & D1 of the Arduino for the external interrupt capability but those 2 controller pins internally also double as Tx/Rx used by the USB program loader.  When that finally clicked, we disconnected the foto interrupter signal wires and were able to successfully upload a program to the UNO.  Then afterwards our budding Robot Engineer amazed everyone by showing how he knew how to reconnect our signal wires to the correct controller pins.

I think tomorrow we'll be able to wire up our DC-DC step-down converter, the H-bridge, and put the juice to our drive motors.  Actually driving around while waving the sonar back and forth will be our next big WOW!!! waypoint on our journey into Robotics.  ¡Júbilo!

BTW, having comm errors with our Arduino was enough to scare me into buying a spare UNO and the bigger brain (ATmega2560).  I found a Costa Rican distributor of Arduino, Adafruit, and Sparkfun products (CRCibernetica - Open Source Hardware) and shockingly the prices were not all that horrible!  In fact they ranged from decent to good! The Genuine UNO Rev 3 microcontroller (our Robot Brain) I bought online in the US for $21.99 (plus paid shipping and impuestos) they have for $21.95 USD, Generic UNO R3 knockoffs with USB cable for $7.95, and the Generic MEGA 2560 Rev 3 (the bigger Bot Brain we need) for $18.95.  Shipping in San José via EMS is $3.00 and outside of San José via EMS is $4.00.  I mused that our tiny country just got bigger, as I began filling our Shopping Cart with more Robot parts, but rather than being in Amazon or on the webpage of some Dallas-based brick-n-mortar, I was in a virtual Costa Rican store:

Welcome to CRCibernética!

CRCibernética.com was born with the goal to seed and grow the open-source hardware community in Costa Rica by providing a source of fair-priced microcontrollers and related components in our online store.  We are authorized distributors of Arduino.cc, Adafruit and Sparkfun Electronics and many other electronics suppliers. We maintain the "Current Stock" levels in real-time, so if you see the item in stock you should be able to be using it in your projects by the next business day.

CRCibernética.com's promise to customers

• to provide a source of open-source hardware products for Costa Rican inventors in Costa Rica
• to maintain prices close to US LIST PRICE in Costa Rica
• to have product ready for local delivery or pickup by the same or next business day.
• to post the real and actual inventory levels and prices with each product

Please note that we do NOT have a storefront.  We offer several options for pickup or delivery in Costa Rica. 

Their online presence looks every bit as nice as one I'd expect from a experienced online retailer out of the US.  So much so, that I had to check out the webpage souce code of their shopping cart webpage to see what they were using (bigcommerce.com) to create this nice store-front.  If I go down the online retailer route again I'd consider using what they are using.

Time to start planning our software approach...  Yay!!!

--

Sam, in Guanacaste

On Sat, Aug 4, 2018 at 5:11 PM Marie Vigil McCain <mcca...@gmail.com> wrote:

science  fair  was an enjoyable part for my kids at school along with

4G and the CA Midwinter  Fair.

if you didn't  live so far I would love to attend... 

MariAn

On Thu, Aug 2, 2018, 1:56 PM Sam Wilson <sliw...@gmail.com> wrote:

I promised an update on our Robot Building in remote Guanacaste...

First off, we have begun!  ;-)  That is always the 1st step.  ;-)

With the Science Fair looming in our kinder, I rushed an order to get us some Robot parts up this way.  [ ... ]