Dormant Blogging

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, August 29th, 2008

Dormant blogging kills the robot star
BubbleBoy is doing good- and looks EXACTLY like a pink snowman with the scarf, which is what I was aiming for.
The coding is going good… it’s all really simple Check out this video of cycling the health levels. For health >= 90 there is an action, but the others there isn’t yet because I haven’t programmed it yet teeheehee.

The video is really slow… as the delay between cycles was 10 seconds At the end you’ll see BubbleBoy’s ‘behaviour’ for health >= 90.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Put on your Sunday Clothes

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 24th, 2008

I actually bought the real Wall-E soundtrack, since I like it so much! It’s uber cool… it comes in a recycled material case

At first, I thought the movie was medium… it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. The whole dystopian/furturistic evolution of people as they became more dependent on technology really freaked me out. The hover chairs and BNL were the main sources of that. They should have taken better care of the planet- cans could have been recycled, along with all the other garbage.
One of the quotes that stands out in my mind is…

Auto: “On the Axiom, you will survive”
Captain: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”

But… everyone is really liking it - except for me!! WHYy? I think I figured it out…
If I didn’t know about dystopian societies, like in Handsmade Tale, 1984, Brave New World… then I wouldn’t have thought that it would be dystopian (which I automatically connect with BAD) but instead, futuristic.
If I wasn’t anticipating a cheesy ‘Hello Dave’ joke with Auto, I wouldn’t have been disappointed, ha.
If I didn’t know that creating robots with emotions as complex as in Eve & WALL-E, then I wouldn’t have taken a ‘that’s almost impossible’* attitude.
*it’s actually not too much ‘that’s almost impossible’, it would just need complex AI, even a form of general AI.

I could go on, but really the point is is that WALL-E is a really awesome movie if I didn’t know… . Now that I realize that, it is a pretty good movie I’m for sure buying the 3 DVD set.

The soundtrack is amazing too… everyone should spend the extra few dollars to buy it in real

Posted in: Animation News, News, Other News.

Stuff!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

• Arduino
• 2 ProtoShields
• Arduino bootloader
• Multimeter
• Boarduino
• Motor Shield
• Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first…
Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer
Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

BubbleBoy’s Hello World!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 18th, 2008

Woooaah! I wanted to make this blog post yesterday, but there was an insane storm! So I’ll just fake the date as Monday even though it’s Tuesday.
I’ve been working on BubbleBoy a bit, and I’ve got it to a state where it is Hello World!
Here are pictures of the progress!

I started out with the BubbleBoy seen a few months ago, then added more and more and more to it, like a DC motor for a hat, a vibrating DC motor for the hula-ring, 2 LEDs and a LDR, two buttons, and the LCD. It doesn’t sound like much, and it really isn’t, but it certainly filled up the inside of the box pretty fast. The box is one of those Sundae ice cream ones.

You might be wondering what the two buttons and LCD are for… the two buttons are for food and water respectively, and the LCD will display BB (bubbleBoy) ’s current mood, thirstiness, hungriness and overall health. The things that will influence BB’s mood will be the LDR, and the thirstiness and hungriness. So, it will sort of be like a physical tamagotchi! The LEDs on BB will indicate if BB becomes thirsty or hungry. If BB is in the dark, the happiness will decrease as it will be “afraid” of the dark.

The bunches of photos above are the calm before the storm of the entanglement of the wires from BubbleBoy to the ProtoShield on the Arduino.

The last photo, above, was when I realized I forgot to plug in the Arduino

Yay! So, it’s all working now and just has to be programmed from the pseudo-code in my head. The main problem I faced was trying to debug the dead DC hat motor… there were so many things that could have been wrong, like the TIP 121, Diode, short circuit, batteries… but I guess I debugged in the right order - saving the snipping of the DC motor until last. The DC motor didn’t work at all, so it was completely dead. Luckily, the other one I had worked just fine
I’m going to have to do a lot of playing around with the hula ring … it doesn’t move as much as I wanted it to I’m also adding a scarf (that I had a nightmare about a few days ago) and eventually will paint the box LIME GREEN
The point of finishing this robot is not only to finish another robot, but I’ll also be entering it into crabfu’s Most Characterful contest. The prize is $100 that can be spent in the TR store… and look what’s really cool there! The Lynxmotion servo serial controller! If I won, I could buy one to replace the two dead Pololu SSC’s to make my MANOI work! =D!!! It would also be handy to have one of these Pan and Tilt devices for Phoenix … It woould also be great to have many FSRs for Phoenix too And a temp sensor! I’m just worried that no one will like BB as it’s pink and tidy ;(

Here’s a video of the hat spinning, and the Hello World program!

more to come soon!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Sightseeing Around

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I think I have been stuck in a bubble for a long time judging by how long it has taken me to post this- more pictures from my trip to Stanford It is mainly the Golden Gate Bridge and Capitola Beach. The Golden Gate Bridge is pretty amazing in real… I wonder how much paint it needs per year?! As for Capitola Beach, this was one of our outings for the first Saturday. It was okay, a bit of an ugly beach though. The weather was cold… water was cold… everything was very cold! The ice cream was good though. Oh yeah- I wrecked my camera at Capitola Beach because of the water and the sand. It was pretty sad. But I picked up a better camera at Best Buy, for a really cheap price, so it was pretty cool! There are also some pictures of De Anza drive and… APPLE! Click continue reading for all the pictures

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Posted in: Other, Projects.

Bad Day

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

It was a pretty bad day at my research lab today (aka: my desk next to the kitchen table, the kitchen table itself, and the floor) .

I was playing around with the Pololu uSSC’s, they were working great after I set the servo numbers!

But, I was a little troubled by two things.
1) When the program is sent to the Arduino, the Pololu uSSC gets a fatal error because of all the goobley that goes on the TX line when transferring the program to the ATmega.

2) When I pressed on the servo, the voltage drain was visible when the boards flashed on and off

For the first problem, I tried so many things with switches and crazy circuits … but it didn’t work. So I just used a jumper from the Arduino TX to another row where the SIN’s would be on the Pololu uSSCs so that I would only have to unplug one wire instead of two each time I was trying a program. That was OK.

For the next problem, I supplied 3 more volts in the form of two rechargeable AA’s. But… after looking at a breadboard for so long your eyes start to go crazy… I inverted the poles.

It wasn’t even a second later when the board became so hot that I panicked, tearing it out of the board. But, a cloud of smoke lingered in the air. At that time I knew it was toasted… even one of the batteries was smoking.

So at the end of the day, I have one extremely dead Pololu uSSC, one that doesn’t work, and one dead RBBB. I *think* the RBBB isn’t working because the ATmega isn’t working

So… yeah… pretty bad day. The lack of sun week after week after week doesn’t help either. It’s like living in a groundhog hole You get some sun, but once you go out, it disappears.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

RBBBs and Pololu SSCs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

I received the two RBBB’s, 1 FTDI TTL USB cable, and two Pololu Serial Servo Controllers (SSC) I bought a few weeks ago. Since then… I’ve been tinkering with them quite a bunch. I learned an incredible amount too from just a tiny board!

Building up the RBBB wasn’t too hard. At first, I printed off the wrong ‘instructions’ - which mind boggled me a bit until I noticed that they were indeed wrong. Once I had the right instructions printed… it was more simple. I was worried about the polarity of the bigger capacitors. After I had it all finished… I went and looked up the FTDI-USB cable specs. This cable is pretty interesting if you think about it, 1 wire turns into 6 more colourful wires -Gnd, CTS (clear to send), +5V, TX, RX, RTS (request to send). I downloaded the Blink program without any problems… until I wanted to test it. The LED wasn’t blinking! After about 5 minutes of intense thought, I realized that there was no LED on pin 13. That was a stupid mistake!

Another stupid mistake, but this one is funnier, was when I was trying to test the other RBBB.
… I forgot to put the chip into the IC socket. That really made me ‘lol’ for 10 minutes.

Then, I was trying to fit it into the breadboard… lets just say it took a longer than normal time.

When the Pololu SSCs showed up, I was pretty excited! Then when I saw them… they are REALLY tiny! It was a big challenge to solder these without them flying out of my hand. I don’t have a 3rd hand tool to hold it steady, so I would sometimes have to hold the ‘pinchy-things’ with my elbow and hold the solder and soldering iron with my hands. The headers were extremely difficult too…

Getting the Pololu to work with the Arduino is pretty aggrivating. I think I’m almost there, I just have to switch the input to the logic level side as I was using the RS-232 one. I thought that the Arduino used RS-232 on its TX line, but it doesn’t. It uses a non-inverted logic level (er well, that’s at least what I read). Tomorrow I plan on looking up the difference between the two
Here are some pictures… I finally threw the desoldering pump out the window (joking) and bought solder wick. Also finally bought NON-LEAD SOLDER!

Other than playing with these, I’ve been flow-charting A LOT of AI programs, and learning more first-order predicate logic. I really like logic and the probabilities and Bayes and everything!!!!! Also having fun thinking about random and bell curves… More back-dated Stanford blog posts to come (so many photos hahah)!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.