Stefans Blog

In the last 2 weeks I was collecting some data for the Openstreetmap project by always driving another to uni and back *g*. Its a real cool project for build a map of the earth based on the Wiki idea that everybody can take part in it (like Wikipedia). The goal is to have free maps without any stupid licenses, so they can be used for _everything_.
One important notice: In the upper right corner of the Map on the www.openstreetmap.org side, there is a “+” sign, where you can change the view from “Mapnik” to “Osmarender”, the first one only gets rendered once per week or so, the Osmarender is a distributed rendering project and pretty much up2date (regenerated every 30mins or 1hour).

Anyway, whats needed to help the project is a simple GPS receiver for around 40Euro on a laptop together with the Software from the Openstreetmap project, called JOSM together with its LiveGPS Plugin.
Basically how it works is to track a way by saving the GPS position every second and saving it as a .gpx file. This file can later be loaded by JOSM as a background layer and the mapping (drawing lines for streets and tagging things) can begin.
But even better is, that I can track ways with my mobile (Motorola A780), because it has a build in GPS device Therefore I am using the software BikeAtor which creates .gpx files as well.

The result so far for my Hometown Baunatal is:

I decided to buy something from my xmas money to play around with. So I came up with the idea to substitude my old, huge and power eating homeserver by a small and energy saving one. The problem was, that those Mini ITX PCs don’t have enough PCI slots. That’s why I switched to USB for my ISDN cards (Asterisk VOIP PBX) and was lucky that I found a board from Jetway which has an extension slot for extracards, like network cards with multiple interfaces.

The board is a J7F2EDEN10G with a 1GHz Via C7 CPU with passive cooling. I also bought 1GB of RAM, a USB ISDN Fritzcard v2, a Acer ISDN USB-mini ISDN adapter and a 320GB harddisk (SATA). Together with my old 160GB harddisk (IDE) I made a software RAID 1 with 160GB and left the other 160GB for my DBOX settop box for TV recordings. In the PCI slot there is a Motorola X100 clone card which unfortunately doesn’t work at the moment, because its sharing the interrupt together with some other devices
But alltogether, the Gentoo Linux system runs fine on it and the new Asterisk 1.4 with Gtalk and Jabber support is really nice too.
The best thing is: It just consumes 31Watts on high load! (26Watts if idle) instead of 117Watts, the old PC consumed…

I build the case out of glas, similar to acrylic glass, but its called “Hobbyglas” or “Bastelglas” in german, which should be easier to handle when cutting it. But to be honest, it is not really easier to handle

Here are some pictures of the case:

Back:

Top:

Front:

Side:

PCI Slot:

One of our “very intelligent” politicians, Wolfgang Schaeuble, our Minister of Interior wanted to make a law against “computer hacking”. Now he finally made it! The law prohibits to create, sell, publish or give away software that can test passwords or the access to a computer system. And on top of that: Someone who uses such a “Hacker-Tool” is treated as a criminal!

In other words: It is not allowed anymore in Germany to test the security of a computer system, because you are not allow to own software which is doing it.
This also means, that companies that are helping others to secure their computer systems/networks are not allowed to work anymore! I mean, how stupid is that? There’s just one exception in the law, which says that some companies can get a “licence to hack”, so they are allowed to use “Hacker-Tools”, but it doesn’t say what preconditions the company must have to get such a licence..
Even better is, that the government should get the right to install trojans or other viruses on the computers of their citizens in order to investigate their computers “just in case” a crime had happened.
So, how should you be able to protect yourself against that, if you are not allowed to own computers programs that help to secure your computer?

This means for me, personally, that I won’t be allowed to work in Germany probably. I’m studying computer science with a focus on computer security, so I need to work with those “Hacker-Tools”…

For german readers some links on german news sites:

Heise Online
Chaos Computer Club

The second round is already finished. We got quite unlucky against Tech United, because we got a goal from a player which was standing in the middle of our half of the field, which didn’t move. They have a pretty strong shot, so it went into our goal. The rest of the game was pretty even, so the result was 0:1 unfortunately.
Our second game in the second round was against the Stuttgart CoPS, which are the current vice champion. It was a good game for the audience, nice to watch. But the result was 1:4 against us, that’s why we finished 5th/6th in this tournament. I say 5th/6th because there is no game to decide who is on which place. We are quite happy about the result and can catch up some sleep this night.

It was a very nice game against the Brainstomer Tribots, although we lost it. We were a very tough opponent for them and you could see a real soccer game with a lot of action. For example two of our robots were lieing on their side, one because it was stopping too fast and one because it climbed a Tribot We lost some holders for our laptops and had to do a fast pit stop for changing the batteries for one robot. Normaly we would have lost only by 2:0 instead of the official 3:0 result, but we pushed the ball between a defender and the goalie into our own goal Anyway, the audience had a lot of fun while watching it, compared to a lot of other games where robots didn’t even move. Before the game we made a lot of changes in our software, especially on dribbling the ball near the outlines and increased the speed, which was definitely necessary.
We are now second in our group and waiting for the drawing of the fixtures in the next round.
there are two groups again with three teams each, the first two of each group are taking part in the semifinal.
So cross your fingers for us!

Update: I just heard from a team member that we got quite a lot of hardware damage on our robots, but they are repaired right now.

The third game was unfortunately pretty much the same like the second one: A lot of direct goals by our players, which do not count, some bugs in the dribble behaviour that were fixed on one robot, but not on all and some other stuff went wrong. At halftime we changed our team policy to play a little bit more offensive, it looked like it’s working OK so we are thinking about keeping this in further games. Anyway, the result was 2:0 for Carpe Noctem against Mostly Harmless

The next game will be the hardest one for us in our group, because it’s against the current world champion. We try to make it a tough game, but we are in the next round anyway, already.

We got our second win, but it was a pretty bad game, not to say very bad… Although we won 2:0 against the Ulm Sparrows, we had a lot of problems with our calibration, especially on the blue goal and with standard situations again, where we didn’t wait for 10 seconds as the opponent robot didn’t touch the ball on a freekick. We almost shot a third goal too, but we were lucky and hit the post of our goal.
We need to eliminate those things in order to have a nice game again as we had in the first half of our first game and be successful in the next round the day after tomorrow.
Tomorrow we will have two games in this round left, one against Mostly Harmless and one against the current world champion Brainstormer Tribots.

With a delay of about 3,5 hours we won our first game against Paderkicker from Paderborn with 8:0. We already had a lead of 7:0 after the first half which was brilliant. Everything was working nicely, the robots were located properly, they knew where the goals were and were able to dribble around the opponents. In the second half we had some problems with the wireless network connection so we sometimes didn’t receive the start signal in standard situations like freekick or throwin and there were some other strange problems too we need to analyze now before our next game, which is around 9m I guess. This one is against the Ulm Sparrows, a team we played together with in a mixed team last year at the world championship.

Well, it’s a pretty long time ago since my last blog post and I think that I won’t blog very continously in the the future, but one post at at time is not too bad I guess.

At the moment I’m at the RoboCup German Open with our soccer robots and we are taking part in the competition in the Middle Size League. Setup is making progress and we already managed to let the robots drive yesterday which is pretty good, because the wooden walls overhere are looking like they are red for our camera. The problem is, that the ball detection relies on that the ball is red only… We got rid of this problem by ignoring the stuff outside the field, but then next problem came up: It’s too dark in the hall, so the yellow goal is looking red too, or depending on our colour calibration the ball get’s yellow too… Anyway, we got them to work and dribble on all three sides yesterday evening already and we are now looking forward to our first test game at probably 3pm today. We also got lucky with the teams in our group, so if everything is working fine, we should be pretty competitive.

There’s a webcam in our teamarea too, but to be honest we spend most of the time on the field, so there’s not that much to see. But at the times of our games we will install the laptop with the webcam near the field somewhere I think:
The address is:
http://www.npw.net/~das-lab/cam.html

You can also have a look at our website to get the schedule of the games and other informations:
Carpenoctem RoboCup Team

Yes, finally I managed to upload them all, thanks to my uni

I think it takes you hours to view them all, but they are awesome!

The only problem is, that I didn’t rotate all the pictures properly yet, but as soon as I have more time, I’ll do it.