Tag: engineering

Bullseye! Mark Rober’s intelligent dart board

A dart in the Bullseye
Bullseye Image by Tim Bastian from Pixabay

Mark Rober, an engineer and YouTuber who worked for NASA, has created a dartboard that jumps in front of your dart to land you the best score. Throw a dart at his board and infra-red motion capture cameras track its path, and, software (and some maths) predicts where it will land. Motors then move the dartboard into a better position to up the score in real time!

To track the dart Mark used a motion-capture system with six cameras that respond to infrared instead of light (this let the cameras follow the movement of just the dart, which had a special infrared reflecting surface, and not all the other stuff in the room that would distract a light-sensing camera). He used Matlab to program the maths needed to calculate (very quickly!), from the parabolic path the dart was flying in, where it was about to land, so that the dart board could be moved into place and meet it. The movement of the darts board was controlled by fishing wire (literally) and small motors to pull the board left, right, up or down under the control of an Arduino.

Possibly the most ridiculously over-engineered thing but a lot of fun, even if a bullseye isn’t the highest possible score on a dart board (hitting the bullseye gives you 50 points but landing your dart in the triple 20 segment gives you 60!)

See the board in action in his YouTube video [EXTERNAL]

– Jo Brodie, Queen Mary University of London

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An earlier version of this post originally appeared both on this blog and on the back page of issue 28 of the CS4FN magazine, Cunning Computational Contraptions, a fun look at the history of computational devices which you can download as a PDF from the link below.

This issue of the magazine contains articles about automata, core rope memory (used by NASA in the Moon landings), Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) and Difference Engine made of cog wheels and levers, mercury delay lines, standardising the size of machine parts, Mary Coombs and the Lyons tea shop computer, computers made of marbles, i-Ching and binary, Ada Lovelace and music, a computer made of custard, a way of sorting wood samples with index cards and how to work out your own programming origin story….

Part of a series of ‘whimsical fun in computing’ to celebrate April Fool’s (all month long!).

Find out about some of the rather surprising things computer scientists have got up to when they're in a playful mood.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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Claude Shannon: Inventing for the fun of it

Image by Paul Curzon

Claude Shannon, inventor of the rocket powered Frisbee, gasoline powered pogo stick, a calculator that worked using roman numerals, and discoverer of the fundamental equation of juggling! Oh yeah, and founder of the most important theory underpinning all digital communication: information theory.

Claude Shannon is perhaps one of the most important engineers of the 20th century, but he did it for fun. Though his work changed the world, he was always playing with and designing things, simply because it amused him. Like his contemporary Richard Feynman, he did it for ‘the pleasure of finding things out.’

As a boy, Claude liked to build model planes and radio-controlled boats. He once built a telegraph system to a friend’s house half a mile away, though he got in trouble for using the barbed wires around a nearby pasture. He earned pocket money delivering telegrams and repairing radios.

He went to the University of Michigan, and then worked on his Masters at MIT. While there, he thought that the logic he learned in his maths classes could be applied to the electronic circuits he studied in engineering. This became his Masters thesis, published in 1938. It was described as ‘one of the most important Master’s theses ever written… helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science.’

Claude Shannon is known for his serious research, but a lot of his work was whimsical. He invented a calculator called THROBAC (Thrifty Roman numerical BACkward looking computer), that performs all its operations in the Roman numeral system. His home was full of mechanical turtles that would wander around, turning at obstacles; a gasoline-powered pogostick and rocket-powered Frisbee; a machine that juggled three balls with two mechanical hands; a machine to solve the Rubik’s cube; and the ‘Ultimate Machine’, which was just a box that when turned on, would make an angry, annoyed sound, reach out a hand and turn itself off. As Claude once explained with a smile, ‘I’ve spent lots of time on totally useless things.’

A lot of the early psychology experiments used to involve getting a mouse to run through a maze to reach some food at the end. By performing these experiments over and over in different ways, they could figure out how a mouse learns. So Claude built a mouse-shaped robot called Theseus. Theseus could search a maze until he solved it, and then use this knowledge to find its way through the maze from any starting point.

Oh, and there’s one other paper of his that needs mentioning. No, not the one on the science of juggling, or even the one describing his ‘mind reading’ machine. In 1948 he published ‘A mathematical theory of communication.’ Quite simply, this changed the world, and changed how we think about information. It laid the groundwork for a lot of important theory used in developing modern cryptography, satellite navigation, mobile phone networks… and the internet.

– Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London.

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This blog is funded by EPSRC on research agreement EP/W033615/1.

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