Our PC104 Blade cases have been developed with funding from two European H2020 projects – TULIPP and VineScout – and are targeted towards Sundance’s EMC2 boards that are PCIe/104 OneBank form-factor boards with Xilinx’s FPGA/SoC (Artix, Kintex, Zynq) or MicroSemi’s FPGA (PolarFire).  The EMC2 is an OpenSource board that is shared on CERN’s Open Hardware Repository site.

The focus of the PC104-Blade is enabling PC/104 boards to be integrated into a box that is not only stackable, but also has no internal cables. The concept can be adopted to be used with ANY PC/104 form-factor boards.  Sundance are actively trying to share this concept amongst the PC/104 Consortium members.

Engineering Design Show 2019

At the Engineering Design Show we had some issues with lighting – both the general arena lighting and that of the various companies around using coloured neon lights gave a lot of unpredictability to white balance and saturation, affecting detection of the ball. As all problems should be, this was used as an opportunity to enhance the solution! We created a new threshold profile on the fly to better predict colour changes and this, along with a few other tweaks, helped improve the detection.

The Agito is a fantastic robot to work with for many reasons, not least of which is the 4 wheel steering. It came into it’s own in the tight confines of the robotics innovation hub where the increased manoeuvrability it offers meant that there was minimal need for any manual handling. Another plus is that a serial port connection is used to control the Agito. This gives it a somewhat unique ability over other robots – there is no SDK to work around so we are able to create a movement library that suits the task rather than having to adapt code to work with an existing SDK.

Working with Motion Impossible has been a joy and we’ve got a lot of plans for this combination of their Agito and our VCS-1. We’ll be back at the show next year which gives us a lot of time to add functionality to this demo, watch this space…