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.