First thing I did today was going to the college club rush for the robotics club I am apart of. I am the secretary for Inspire Robotics engineering club at Florida Atlantic University. Even though I am still in highschool they still allowed me to join the club and all of the officers for the club are mentors at the Techgarage program which also happens to be where we will work. The club rush gave us a total of 40 new interested people which was pretty good for a two-hour session. The main purpose of the club is to build FAU students engineering skills by allowing them to work on personal projects such as an electric skateboard or their own arcade machine. If we find students that have a solid set of skills we give them the opportunity to work for 15 dollars an hour at Techgarage. For more information on techgarage and their mission go to their website.
After getting a bite to eat we all headed to Techgarage to start helping out with the RDL game design. I have talked about the Robot Drone League briefly in some of my other posts but its basically a robotics competition for middle and high school kids where they have to complete certain tasks using a drone and a robot that they build. The season starts September 7th meaning we need to have a new compelling game designed and built-in under two weeks. We already know that the theme is going to be superheroes and the main field elements will look like a cityscape but, that doesn’t include a le book, game objectives, or actually building field objects. So today we actually started building some of the game pieces. The main scoring objective for drones will be these RFID tag beacons. Every drone will have an RFID tag and when they fly over these towers the twoers will then be claimed with their color and they will score points at the end of the match based on the ones they own.
However, in order for this to work, e need a way to communicate with the beacons. We started off using an Arduino but these have no networking capabilities so to integrate with the IoT server we are using for game control we need to use a raspberry pi running python code to connect it to the field. Basically, there will be two IoT devices created by the raspberry pi one is a sensor which is the RFID tag reader and the other one is a color light that can be set by the IoT server. So if the server sees a certain RFID tag value it will change the color of the beacon by changing the color of the IoT light. This creates a robust method of changing game pieces when an event happens and it can also be changed very dynamically.
That’s, not the only game infrastructure that needs changes. Currently, y proxy that connects the AR magic leap world to the real word with IoT devices needs some changing. To read more about what I have already done with this go here. My current design uses a single Magic Leap as the master device that can stop and start the server and while this is functional it does not provide one good scalability and two isn’t the proper control scheme. I have to redesign this proxy so that a user interface is used to start and stop the IoT server. This user interface would also show you which devices are connected and what devices they have in their Unity environment. Each device would send its information first such as team color. Every device would then receive special data packets based on the IoT devices it actually has in its environment. This would allow different games and different apps to be run using the same proxy so you can connect two different unity games and have them interact with each other through the IoT server. This will work really well for the RDL game but there are a few more questions I have.
- Is it possible to dynamically add devices while the server is running
- Can you automatically add devices to the server as they appear
- Can a certain event be triggered when a device of a certain type is added
Devin Willis 