JEDI FORCE TRAINING DRONE!
This is Sophie she’s, gon na make me a training droid to help enhance my Jedi training, All right, let’s try this again. This video is sponsored by KiwiCo.
The future of play is engaging, enriching and seriously fun.
It’s.
One thing to build a lightsaber but wielding a lightsaber is entirely different: Jedi go through years and years of training, traditionally starting as younglings Progressing to padawans before ascending to jedi knight – And you know, maybe someday being granted the title of the master Hello there.
But hey.
We all know Luke, didn’t start as a youngling and he only saved the galaxy.
So I think it’s fine to start at a more advanced age of 30.
Speaking of padawans here at Hacksmith industries.
We take on co, ops from a variety of tech backgrounds and experiences to help them refine their practical hands on skills And because projects take months and months to complete.
We need a team of engineers that manage to come out with a new video week after week. After week, This is Sophie from the university of Waterloo.
She studies mechanical engineering and, according to this, she’s also a member of the waterloo, Rocketry team.
She clearly knows a lot about sci, fi tech Hired.
She’ll be with us for the next four months and in those four months she’s, gon na make me a training droid to help enhance my jedi training and by the next four months.
I actually mean the previous four months because in typical Hacksmith fashion we’re actually filming the intro of this video at the end of the project.
Anyway, I guess I better get started training To build our training droid.
The first thing we’re going to need is a camera that can recognize and more importantly, track people.
Fortunately, for us, this camera already exists.
It’s called the Zed II Made by stereo labs.
This camera is the full package: It’s, built for the spatial AI arrow, with its big power and small form factor. But How exactly are we going to make this camera fly? I could just use the force, but that isn’t always exactly Shall we say Practical, so we’re going to rely on drone technology, No, not droid Drone.
I spent the better part of a month researching the components that go into building a custom drone and settled on these.
First, we found the receiver the FreeSky x8r.
It uses the sbus communication protocol to take instructions from the remote control.
We want to make this drone as powerful as possible, so we got this three thousand milliamp hour: 6 cell lipo battery to power the entire thing.
Next up, we have the t motor f4 flight controller.
This is the brains of the drone, The Leia Organa of the operation.
It takes the instructions from the receiver and tells the motors what they need to do Paired with the flight controller is the t motor 55 amp pro 2 electronic speed controller ESC? For short, It takes in the instructions from the flight controller and gives the motors a certain amount of current so that they spin.
Next we have a question of optimization.
Those who know drones know that there are balancing act between rotational speed and power. You need both of those to push the air down and create thrust.
We chose the t: motorvillox 2208 kv 1750 motors And the t motor 5147 propellers That’s a lot of numbers that have specific meanings, but I don’t have time to explain that to you right now.
Together, these generate 6 800 grams of thrust.
They’re the perfect duo Like Han Solo and Luke Skywalker blasting tie fighters out of the sky.
All of these components get strapped to a frame.
This is just a prototype, so we laser cut two layers of wood with lots of holes for the flight controller.
Stack the battery the receiver and the motors And finally, the remote controlling business, comes in with the transmitter.
The FreeSky Taranis It’s got all the buttons and switches I’ll need to control the drone.
Let’s assemble this thing and make sure it works.
Jedi strength, flows from the force, but beware of the dark side: Okay, Let’s see. If this thing can fly Consume you it will.
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What about guns? The droid needs to fire, something at the person training.
Unfortunately, lasers like in the movie don’t exist in real life, but nerf does and we have like 400 nerf bullets left over from the screaming gun project To fire. These little guys, I’ll have to design a custom launching mechanism Solidworks Solidworks.
This is the mechanism I designed I’ll, show you how it works.
It starts with two 3d printed parts inside of that are two motors that spin together and launch the ball through We’ve got a gating system to control the firing rate and it moves in that way controlled by the servo motor.
Here I’m happy with this design.
Let’s print it.
Our 3d prints have finished, so we can start to build the launching mechanism.
We’ve got a pipe here to act as the magazine it’ll hold about 10 nerf bullets.
We’ve got motors to launch them some other pieces for a gating mechanism, A servo motor tons of nuts and bolts to piece it all together And my trusty glue gun pew pew.
So we have our camera, our drone and our gun Problem.
Is they’re stupid? They don’t play nicely together, so we need them to get together and sing kumbaya To do that. We’ll write some code.
The computer needs to talk to the camera.
The computer needs to talk to the gun.
The computer needs to talk to the drone, and I need to talk to my mom And you should talk to yours.
She misses you.
I’ve spent literally three months working on this code.
It’s the coolest and most infuriating part of this project.
This is the most complicated software that we’ve ever written at Hacksmith Industries even more complicated than the software that runs Bogdan.
What? Ah never mind We wrote the code and run the code on the NVidia Jetson.
The Jetson, Xavier NX is a powerful little computer. It has 6 cpu cores and 8 gigabytes of ram It’s designed to run computer vision and machine learning.
Algorithms.
The camera plugs into the Jetson And the gun plugs into Blast.
The camera plugs in easily via usb, but the gun, flight, controller and receiver all need something different.
They’re trying to talk to each other, but they’re just speaking different languages.
If only we had C3 PO to act as interpreter, How did we get into this mess? It’s time to hop into all team designer and make our own 3PO a pcb Altium designer? Is the industry standard for pcb design? You can download it and try it for free at www altium com, yt thehacksmith.
There’s also Altium viewer a free online platform that allows people to view all kinds of file formats.
C3Po has arrived.
It connects onto the output pins of the NVidia Jetson and connects all of our hardware.
Finally, they’re, all speaking the same language that the Jetson can understand, Check out the full electronic schematic on maker io On paper. Everything should work, but let’s put it to the test.
We’ve got the camera and the gun hooked up to the Jetson.
We’ve got a monitor connected to the camera, so we can watch the live output When the camera recognizes a person.
The Jetson should tell the gun to fire: let’s see if it works.
Okay, all we need now is a person to shoot at.
I guess I’m a person.
Oh my gosh.
It works Okay.
This is awesome, oh my goodness.
Okay, now that we know everything works, we can move on to the final assembly. This will include a new frame with mounting points for all of the hardware We’ll attach everything to that All right.
It’s time to put this thing to the test.
I just have to find a way to lure James here.
He’s been training pretty hard.
I bet he’s.
Pretty thirsty Water hacksmith store That’s weird All right.
This is pretty fun, but we didn’t make the world’s.
First, plasma based lightsaber not to use it All right, let’s try this again, All right! That’s not actually working very well! That’s, because despite this plasma, lightsaber being super hot, Because the nerf balls are flying so fast, they don’t.
Actually have enough time to melt when they’re flying through the blade.
Luckily, we also have our tungsten titanium lightsaber, which has a solid blade. All right, my Jedi training has paid off.
That was freaking awesome, the tungsten, titanium, solid blade, definitely works.
Alright.
This is freaking awesome, our very own Star Wars, training drone Who doesn’t want a drone that can target you and shoot you to help.
You become a Jedi.
I think it’s, freaking awesome.
You did a fantastic job Sophie and I just wanted to present you with a little certificate to remember your time here at Hacksmith Industries.
Best of luck with the rest of your degree, and if you guys want to be an intern, make sure you check out our website on the careers page or apply to your local, high school or university.
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