Friday, May 18th, 2012

We are located in Expo Hall in the corner down near the back! We have a lime green tablecloth and RoboBrrds, it will be hard to miss.

Come and see our newest RoboBrrd! LightningBrrd aka RC/DC aka Sparky Sparrow!

FireBrrd will be there!

WIN AN EXCLUSIVE ROBOBRRD!

Take a picture of you and RoboBrrd at our table and tweet it to @RobotGrrl with the #makerfaire hashtag, and be entered to WIN an exclusive prototype of RoboBrrd kit version when it is ready!

Hope to see you at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012!

Sunday, May 13th, 2012

At Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, meet RoboBrrd! RoboBrrd is a lil robotic animatronic character who’s many capabilities extend its cute character.

It’s perfect for students to get started in learning robotics, and making their own robot from scratch! Here is the Instructable for building a popsicle stick version, and a RoboBrrd kit version is coming soon.

Here are three magical things about RoboBrrd:

• Different hats change its behaviours!
• It can communicate to other robots via a mesh network!
• It eats virtual fruit from an iPad!

But of course, it’s not really magic! You can make it yourself! Want to learn how it was done? Ask me at Maker Faire!

WIN AN EXCLUSIVE ROBOBRRD!

Take a picture of you and RoboBrrd at our table and tweet it to @RobotGrrl with the #makerfaire hashtag, and be entered to WIN an exclusive prototype of RoboBrrd kit version when it is ready!

Hope to see you at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012!

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Up to this point the progress on RoboBrrd has been pretty scrambled. But tonight, I hit a milestone! The cardboard prototype of RoboBrrd is pretty good! The only thing that needs to be confirmed is how to actually attach the beak to the frames to make it rotate, same with the wings. There should be some sort of rivet that can be used

This picture isn’t the exact beak version, but it illustrates the point here.

Out of nowhere I wake up with this idea that it would be really cool to have the wing servos and beak servo supported by being suspended between the top and bottom faces. It took a while to get this idea working, and the pieces for this stage are extremely dependent on each other. However, using this idea saves an incredible unbelievable amount of space.

One of the great things about being here is to rapidly prototype everything. It helped get the beak centered and sorted out very quickly compared to if I were to just try to do it by CAD. Here is a stack of cardboard brrds that are swamping Impy RoboBrrd!

It takes a while to understand the best settings to choose for laser cutting a material that does not have a template for it. For cardboard I usually had to do multiple passes. Each time I tweak the parameters and am getting pretty close to having great cuts on the first try.

There has been a lot of thought that has gone into what material should be used. At first I started out using basswood, but to get it in 6 inches rather than 4 is quite more expensive, and not a lot of people have it around. In the end we’re going to be using some mdf. It’s not very expensive, and it is really sturdy!

For fun, here was some test cuts done on extruded polystyrene. This stuff laser cuts really easily, but you can’t depend on it for kerf testing.

Here is another pic of the initial cardboard lasercut testing. On the corners are some supports that will help in the stability of RoboBrrd to prevent it from collapsing :p

CAD has been so helpful lately. It sucks that I have to use it on this tiny screen, but the number of mistakes that you can catch before cutting is quite amazing. Creating assemblys of all the parts and seeing the piece right before your eyes is amazing!

One of the highlights of being here is that in addition to their amazing laser cutter, they have a shopbot cnc! It is really noisy when it is actually cutting.

I’m also working on some stamps of the Robot Party and RoboBrrd for Hackerspace passports.

The process for laser cutting stamps is interesting. A lot of the features are already built in to the driver software. One of the main differences though is that it is a raster cut rather than vector cut.

Going to the local electronics stores is really cool. You never know what you will find, like this really nice robot hidden away:

In case you missed it, there are two guest blog posts that I’ve done on the Evil Mad Scientist blog! The first one is how to blink an LED with an AVR! Go read it!

The second one is Part 1 of a Heathkit build. It is so cool. Also weird timing because the day I posted it, they also decided to shut down again. They must have seen the blog post and were terrified XD. The build is a lot of fun, so go read about it!

That is about all the progress for now. I’ve done some cool things with code that I can’t really mention here just yet since it is still secret. The past few days I’ve been working on making it parametric so that many more things will be easier. Only problem is that sometimes making things parametric is really trying.

Been learning lots all about electronics and trying to soak it all in like a sponge. Only problem is that with my memory, I hardly soak anything in. But at least the really interesting parts seem to stick pretty well

Another thing that has to be done is that this bird has to be hacked somehow! Since it is so adorable I was thinking of some non-invasive hackery, like adding LED bling or an animatronic exoskelton to it.

There is so much more to be accomplished before Maker Faire Educational Day. It’s going to be insane. I hope I’ll be able to do it all! If RoboBrrd kit version doesn’t get done now, it will probably never get done because there just aren’t that many resources like everything at EMSL up in Canada. This is the sprint before the finish line!

Friday, May 11th, 2012

We had a really lucky opportunity to visit Pixar earlier this week and RoboBrrd came along too! RoboBrrd is quite the robot character as we have all seen, so this was quite special for it. RoboBrrd always chirps late at night how it will one day become an animatronic movie super star! (whatever that means)

Our tour was from @drwave, who I met on Twitter from WWDC’11! EMSL also came along, and it turns out that they also knew him from before. Thanks for the tour drwave!

Pixar is a pretty cool place, at the front there is a huge scale version of the Luxo Jr. lamp and its ball! Check it out!

The inside is super spacious. They probably could fit a spaceship in the atrium area!

Here is RoboBrrd on top of Mike. This would make a great caption contest pic

ROBOBRRD COMES IN PEACE.

This is a very cute picture of Wall-E. Also got a little insight into Wall-E’s arms! For instance, have you noticed how expressive they allow Wall-E to be? It can push them back to look more powerful, but also bring them closer in to make it look more vulnerable.

It’s really cool how many awards Pixar has. Their creativity has brought them to such great heights! These next pics are all from EMSL- thanks guys!

RoboBrrd enjoys trying to communicate with Kevin!

RoboBrrd in an epic staring contest with a bird from For the Birds!

Pixar is a great example of how magical technology combining with art can be. There is tons of computer science that goes on behind the scenes of all the animation, but without the characters and stories it wouldn’t really mean much. It takes them a really long time to render one frame though- about 8 hours.

I wonder how well animatronics could compare in this way. All of the robots would have to be built by hand, but then you can direct them (or they could direct themselves autonomously) and just film the result. You would probably need some computer graphics to enhance explosions and such though. As for faeries now, they aren’t that difficult as you could simply use a UAV.

For large characters this approach might not work well, but for mini swarm characters it would be great. Another cool thing about animatronics would be that the characters would get to roll/walk down the red carpet themselves! With some natural language processing, perhaps they could answer the interview questions as well. Or respond in bleep bloops!

One of the main questions that I’ve had is how to make a squash and stretch robot. For example, Keepon is a squash and stretch robot. These type of robots are always interesting because their degrees of expression are immense. This technique is used often in Pixar films, and it is just fantastic to add more expression to the characters.

Originally I was thinking in terms of using multiple swashplates to get the movement correct. However, it would be a lot better to use a robot that has some sort of volume, like if it is filled with a fluid or something. This answer is a great help! Though in my robots I’ll probably use bean bag beans rather than a liquid, it is a step in the right direction. Really looking forward to trying to make a squwetchy robot!

Thanks @drwave for giving us a tour! You rock! It was fantastic to go to Pixar!

Friday, May 11th, 2012

Ever wanted to make X11 look a lot cooler? There is a way, using some custom themes! With this you can make things like gEDA look even more cool when using a black theme. Now let it be known that this method is sort of not stable and I’ve had mixed results with it. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t- haven’t really figured out why yet.

Open up terminal and do this (you’ll need Macports installed). The search should return results to proceed further. The two things we will be installing are a theme, and the theme picker.

The themes are stored at this place, so do this command…

And you can move in your various themes to here…

And now for the best part! To actually choose the theme! Let’s open up chtheme! Use this command:

Now hopefully you will have some themes that you can switch to there. If not, I’m not sure what has happened. This has been happening to me quite often, but there are some occasions where I get it to work and it’s pretty cool.

If you ever want to reset everything…

If you are looking for some cool themes, there are a handful of most excellent ones on deviantART that you can search around for. Hopefully it works out good for you, have fun with your new X11 look!

Wednesday, May 9th, 2012

The Robot Party is tomorrow, Thursday at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This week might be a little different than other weeks thanks to Google+ Hangouts on Air being available to everyone! This is such a super step forward, and will hopefully help greatly with bandwidth issues.

We will be broadcasting LIVE from Evil Mad Science! We may also be giving away a goodie or two, more details on that soon to come! There will be lots of robots, maybe we will put the webcam on the CNC again!

What is the Robot Party?
The Robot Party is a weekly Google+ hangout that brings together robot builders from all over to share their robots, knowledge, and ask questions! It is for all age ranges, young or old, just bring your robot!

The Robot Party is every Thursday at 8PM ET! If you have a robot, join the hangout on Google+ HERE! Be sure to leave a comment on one of the posts so we can add you to our circles for the party.

Hope to see ya at the Robot Party!

Monday, May 7th, 2012

The Robot Party from last week was fantastic! It was LIVE from Evil Mad Science where we showed the LetsMakeRobots v4 drawing with prizes from seeedstudio using NilsB’s robot that Andrew relayed for us! PHEW!

There were many cool robots on this Robot Party! It’s most excellent to see everyone helping everyone! Here we are holding up some robots, the Eggbot and RoboBrrd and a Medium Tank!

You can watch the recording of the Robot Party on YouTube on this playlist!

Here is part 1 of 5!

The complete list of winners is here!
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/31820

Chaot’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeTsyiKaJoQ

RobotFreak’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxVMKiFoXto

It was great to see the robots working live! Here was another robot that stopped by- DataBus from the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Challenge!

Eaglesnest Robotics was also there! They got to show off their Meggy Jr RGBs to the Evil Mad Scientists themselves! Pretty cool!

Didn’t get a chance to donate? Good news! Adafruit Industries has added 5 more prizes! So pop over to LetsMakeRobots now and donate! More info to come on when they will be drawn, and maybe more special things will happen!

LIVE ROCKS! Special thanks to Evil Mad Science for being there LIVE and their speedy internet to broadcast the Robot Party!

See everyone again on Thursday, 8PM ET / 5PM PT!
http://robotgrrl.com/robotparty