We’ll be in Gulu for two weeks from the 7th to 21st of June. We’ll be posting updates right here on our website, our Facebook page, Google Plus Page and on Twitter ( @fundibots )

To say we are terribly terribly excited is an understatement.

We’ll update you as we go along.

Over the course of three days, students were taught the basics of electronics assembled their first ever robot and programmed the machine to move and navigate around the laboratory. It was an exhilirating time for both the students and the teachers as they watched machines come to life and move based on commands that they had given.

The documentary below was filmed during the camp and some interviews were filmed afterwards. It gives a pretty solid idea of what Fundi Bots is about and the experiences that our students, teachers and guests share during their time with us. We hope you enjoy the video.

Fundi Bots – Robotics Camp & Programme Documentary from Elemental Edge on Vimeo.

Fundi Bots – www.fundibots.com – is a non-profit working with students in Ugandan schools. Fundi Bots is focusing on the promotion, exposure, experimentation and technological growth in the fields of electronics and robotics.

This documentary was shot during our Robotics Camps in April 2012, which took place at Nabisunsa Girls School.

Sparky is going to have

• 4 degrees of freedom per hand (shoulder, elbow, wrist and grasp)
• Rudimentary facial expressions, including pseudo-emotional reactions
• Wheeled treads
• Sensors for both Passive Infrared (human detection and follow) and Sonar (obstacle)
• Voice output (v2 Update)

This robot is being built using local materials by one of the student clubs. The drive system is made from a bicycle spoke and chain array. It might run into low traction issues but for now it runs suprisingly well.

The right motor / gear system is from an old CD tray and the left one is a home-made replica. The frame is wire put held together with rubber sliced bicycle tubing tightly wrapped to connect the wires and then covered with cellotape.

It’s a slow and tedious process, but watching it come together is amazing. Keep checking back for updates.

Can robotics change the future of a nation?

“I want to go deeper into machines – automatic machines. I was inspired by him when he came to school – so I had to find ways of getting in touch with him.”

Victor Kawagga is a softly spoken young man, but his quiet manner can’t counter the eager sparkle in his eyes and the passion he has for the machines he’s surrounded by. The bedroom of this house in the Ugandan capital Kampala has been converted to a home lab, and the young people hard at work here are building robots. The ‘him’ he is referring to is Solomon King, the 29-year-old technologist and businessman who takes robotics into the classrooms of Uganda as the founder of Fundi Bots.

Continue to the full article.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18956031

In the meantime, here’s a brief of their press release:

This year, the Google in Education group received a record number of inspiring applications for RISE. We expanded the awards to include Sub-Saharan Africa, and in total, we’re awarding more than $340,000 in funding to 13 U.S., eight European and five African organizations.

Our recipients are diverse, ranging from girls robotics teams building high-tech machinery in Nairobi to after-school programs that have students configuring cluster computers in Salt Lake City.

Continue Reading

We’ll update you with details as we go along. For now, we’re off to see how much more we can now do to change the world around us.

Yes it walks. Still refining gait and electronics. Will upload video soon.

I buy almost all my electronics kit from SparkFun and a few weeks back, I reached out them asking if they could subsidize prices for us or if they had a philanthropic arm. It turns out they do have an Education Outreach Department that caters to projects and initiatives like Fundi Bots.

They graciously accepted to send us three SparkFun Inventor’s Kits (Arduino based), plus two CDs of software, well written and documented teacher’s guides and assorted learning material. Actual monetary value is north of $450 dollars (computed cost of purchase and shipping). Fundi Bots value: Priceless.

We’ll definitely be using the learning and teaching material extensively in our school outreach program, and internally as well, since the material is that good. See photos below for details.

Thank you SparkFun, you guys R.O.C.K all sorts of awesome.

An 8×8 LED Matrix looks like this.

An 8×8 LED Matrix. Each white dot contains a red LED.

It’s basically a little square electronic device that has 8 rows of LEDs with 8 LEDs per row, making for a total of 64 LEDs. They are used mostly to as a visual component of a project or application. basically to display low resolution graphics, numbers, letters and so on.

Controlling them is a bit of a pain, because logic would dictate that if each LED has two wires sticking out of it, then an 8×8 LED matrix should have 128 wires, right? Wrong. They actually have 16 wires total. The internal wiring is a little outside of the scope of this post. But let’s just say if you need to light a single LED, you need to power up the column it’s in, then power up the row it’s in. The LED that is at the intersection of the row and column will then be lit. A lot easier said than done.

This weekend, I remembered I had not yet setup an 8×8 matrix code library to use for experiments. Heck, I hadn’t even used an 8×8 matrix with an Arduino. Last time I set one up, I used a PIC 16F. Let’s just say I would NOT like to use Assembly to program again.

So I figured I’d build the code library over the weekend. After much trial and error trying to figure out the wiring, I eventually managed to get the array working. It looked like this.

8x8 LED Matrix fully lit, next to an Arduino board.

Low light view of an 8x8 LED Matrix fully lit, next to an Arduino board.

Once that was done, the next step was to control it more precisely. Basically to build the code to allow it to show what you want it to show.

Now, there’s something very sneaky about the eye. Every thing you see stays “in your eye” for a split second, before your eye processes the next thing you are seeing. This is called persistence of vision, and it’s what allows you to watch movies and animations. Essentially, you are seeing a very fast sequence of still images, but because the images sort of “overlap” in your eye, you do not notice that they are still images. The average movie or tv show contains 25 images in every second of video.

To show an image on an LED matrix, you basically start at the top left corner of the array, and going column by column, row by row, you turn each LED on and off very very fast, lighting only the LEDs you want to show. If you do this fast enough, the person looking at it will be tricked into thinking she is looking at a still image/graphic/number. Like this.

8x8 LED Matrix showing the number 7

8x8 LED Matrix showing the number 3

In reality, what you are seeing is one light being turned off (or on) at a time, starting from the top right, but it’s so fast that your eye is fooled into thinking all of them are on. Sneaky huh?

Here’s a video showing the LED running through a sequence of numbers and patterns. Note: I’ve deliberately customised some patterns so you can see the LEDs being lit up one at a time.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The next step is to clean up the code (right now it’s a little too elementary), and then build the entire alphabet library. Very time intensive stuff. We’ll share the code once we’re done.

Well, that’s it for this update.

Please post your comments and questions below.

Students of Gayaza High School and St. Mary’s College Kisubi have created models of two heavy equipment of importance to the construction and manufacturing industries. The robots include a heavy load carrier baptised “NXT Robot” developed by Gayaza students and a remote-controlled crane by Kisubi students.

The robots were exhibited at Makerere University last week. The high school students were able to assemble the robots with the support of engineering students of the university. Read More at the Daily Monitor