“Experience a new experience designed directly by HMI.”

The reason for the award: An unexpected main menu design from a developer's perspective.
The goal is to develop a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm and a robot dog mini-spot using stepper and BLDC motors.

[Editor's Note] Winner Donghee Lee won the 2023 Grand Prize at the STM32 QUEST GFX Challenge, which STMicroelectronics (hereinafter referred to as ST) has been organizing for several years to promote ST's graphics solutions and gather feedback on their usability. In this challenge, which had 150 participants, winner Donghee Lee won the Grand Prize for his 3-DOF robot arm using TouchGFX. This magazine met with the winner of the Lee Dong-hee Award and asked about the award and her future goals.

■ I'd like to hear about the winning design of this challenge, the 3-degree-of-freedom robot arm.

Most commercial robots around us, such as those found in cafes or chicken chains that serve coffee or fry chicken, use six-degree-of-freedom robotic arms.

To create a robotic arm like the one above, one must solve very complex mathematical formulas through robotics.

The 3-degree-of-freedom robotic arm is the simplest robotic arm structure, and is an educational robotic arm that helps test the mathematical formulas of robotics for moving robotic arms and understand the movement of robots.

▲ Lee Dong-hee's STM32 QUEST GFX Grand Prize Winner's Entry (Photo Source: YouTube Channel Noh Tang Engineer's Robot Story)

If you understand the movement of a robot using a 3-DOF robot, you can apply it to create a commercial 6-DOF robot arm.

■ Why do you think you were able to win the grand prize in this challenge?

I think the main menu design, which was not thought through from a developer's perspective, was a big reason.

Even though there was only a week left until the challenge deadline, I was struggling with the design of the main menu. However, I implemented the idea my daughter gave me and the main menu was expressed cleanly and concisely, which is how I think I won the grand prize.

My daughter's idea is as follows:

▲ (Image provided by: Lee Dong-hee)

Before receiving the idea sketch above, I was obsessed with the idea that all menus should be displayed on one screen, and I could not have imagined the menu icons being cut off like in the idea sketch.

The idea sketch was to create a rotating main menu in two forms: one that rotates the menu on the right, and one that moves up and down (in a straight line) on the left. The actual implemented main menu is as follows.

▲</span> (Image provided by: Lee Dong-hee)

■ What are the unique features of this challenge?

The title of this challenge is unique, such as ‘Create your own HMI (Human-machine interface)’.

Although the developer had no difficulty implementing the designed HMI, the experience of designing the HMI directly felt new.

■ I want to know the background and growth process that led me to work as a developer.

During my 30 years working at the company, I mainly focused on product development (board bring-up, OS porting, device driver development, and GUI-less F/W development).

Currently, I am away from the field and my main interest is robotics. I am building a basic 3-degree-of-freedom robot arm and accumulating the knowledge I had about robotics (forward kinematics, inverse kinematics, etc.).

■ Please tell us about your experience with TouchGFX.

First of all, I first encountered TouchGFX through the e4ds quest.

GUI programming was developed using MFC on Windows, QT on Linux, and directly controlling bitmap images without middleware on MCU-based systems.

Having experience using MFC or QT made it easy to use TouchGFX.

x;"> ■ I'm curious about your future goals

We plan to create a variety of robots.

In this challenge, I built a 3-degree-of-freedom robot arm, but I want to build the final robot arm as a 6-degree-of-freedom robot arm using a stepper motor or BLDC motor instead of a servo motor.

Also, while making mini-spot (a robot dog, Boston Dynamics Spot), which is currently in a slump, I was stopped due to lack of basic knowledge about robots, but I plan to complete the Mini-spot robot as well.

■ Thoughts on winning the grand prize in this challenge

First of all, I would like to thank e4ds make and ST for hosting the challenge.

If it weren't for the challenge, I would have just been thinking about building a three-degree-of-freedom robot someday, but thanks to the challenge, I think I was able to make it happen.

As the challenge progresses, we will see you again with fun robots.