The first pib.Hackathon of the year was a great success! 🙌🎯
 
Over the weekend, we got together with a handful of enthusiastic community members to tinker on our humanoid robot. Our main goal this time was to put together a mobile base for pib. No sooner said than done: We were eagerly printing, building, tinkering and voilà – it worked! 
 
We successfully laid the foundation of pib moving around on a mobile base with mecanum wheels. 🥳

Our achievements in a nutshell:

  • The most visible result as mentioned: We have a working mobile base! Running on 4 mecanum wheels, we built a frame, tested our motors and the electronics and saw, that everything worked much better than even expected
  • We dockerized our software and created a repository on docker-hub, making it really easy and fast to get started with pib’s control/programming
  • A digital twin of pib runs in Webots! And, since done by the same enthusiasts that did the dockerization, there is also a docker-container for that
  • The new upper body was shaped and printed, which is much more beautiful and spaceous than the current one
  • We run SLAM for the first time on our camera and created a model of our hackathon-room. This is not yet production-ready (cheated a bit on the ROS-side), but a great step forward!
On top of the work results, we simply had a great time together. It was wonderful meeting up with old and new fans of our open source project. We printed a lot, broke printers, fixed them, broke them again… Did not sleep a lot… But it was a great time with great people and phantastic results! We are already looking forward to the next event so stay tuned for dates and location!
 
For anyone interested in the 3D print files for the mobile base, check out our Discord server where we posted the link.
Published On: February 19th, 2024