Blog 1 - Andrew Koval

About Me

  •  I was born in Ukraine. I moved to Ireland with my parents in September 2008. I'm mostly fluent in Russian and can understand about 70% of Ukrainian in a conversation (but not speak it).
  • My favorite sports are skiing and kyaking (sea / whitewater).

  • I love drawing, painting, graphic design and 3D modelling. For the longest time ever, I thought that I would pursue a career in animation or as a VFX artist for the film industry. My passion for visual design continued into this course and has turned into an obsession for user interfaces and user experience in the computing world.

      

Ideas 💡

  • Design and fabricate a system of mountable, modular hardware which sits on top of the robot dog. This would significantly simplify the process for secondary (or even primary) school pupils to create microbit-based add-ons for the Unitree Go2 Robot Dog.

  • For the scouts I would love to look into creating microbit-enabled, portable, waterproof and compact devices for environmental / weather motitoring. These have to be easily deployable, low-cost and low-maintainance. several of these 'sensor stations' can be placed around the land to read metrics like river pollution, air purity, humidity, wind speed. and wind direction. A webapp dashboard would aggregate and display the data from the devices.

Microbit Stuff

In my opinion, one limiting factor for Applied Robotics workshops is our heavy reliance on the DFRobot Microbit internet gateway addon board (since we only have two units). At the core of that board, I am almost certain that it uses an ESP32 or ESP 8266-based chip which acts as a bridge between Wi-Fi and the serial or i2c communcation to relay MQTT messages back to the microbit. I propose that we dedicate some time to experiment with creating a bespoke solution for a microbit-to-MQTT gateway by connecting breakout boards to an ESP32 C3 Mini (€2  microcontroller with WIFI and BT) which would significantly decrease the size of future projects and will enable us to use protocols like ESPNOW for longer range radio communication.

I would also like to make use of Adam O'Brien's sensor pod Microbit library for the ideas presented above.



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