I did nothing today! Nothingggggg at all!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008

It really feels like I didn’t do anything today! I guess I did a few bits and bites of stuff… but I didn’t really make a huge dent in any of my projects.

I tried to make my MANOI’s head work off of 12V from a transformer, but it didn’t work. I’m not entirely sure why, but it might have been because the Grounds weren’t common-ized or combined together at any point. Maybe I’ll be able to run all of the motors off of 9V… but I have a feeling MANOI won’t be as sturdy. But, if I do it that way, I know for sure I won’t blow one of these motors! (MANOI’s head is okay, don’t worry)

One of the major aggravating points that I’m faced with is that I can’t get the old board out of it! It’s incredibly frustrating!!! It’s not like I can rip it out… and it’s blocking me from doing the other stuff. Maybe I won’t need jumpers if I can fit the SSC-32 piggybacked with a RBBB into MANOI on a diagonal, where the other board used to be (in this case, still is).

I can’t wait to make it walk!!

This brings me to the Wii Nunchuck situation. I bought one of those “cheap” knock-offs, plugged it into the WiiNunchuck board adapter thingy, and it didn’t work. I debugged everything and came to this solution:

There was a short on one of the boards
Errrg! So now I’m assuming that the Nunchuck is not functional anymore.
-> By the way, that was the board my dad soldered as he wanted to try the soldering iron…

I guess I’ll buy another one and try again, probably after I hook up MANOI.

I’ve been making a pretty neat program in Processing, but I’m not releasing it yet as I can’t get the colours to work properly… and it will look much better with colours.
Additionally, it seems I have finished the sound recording program… now I just will have to program the analysis of the recording’s wave. After that, I make a mock Acoustic Model. During that time… I order the n-gram corpus. By the time they arrive, I hopefully should be done. Then I’ll be sorting the words in the corpus (actually, a computer will probably do it…) and then have Mac’s speech synthesis say the selected words, where then the analysis program would run… and all of the results would be placed into a sqllite database.

Following that, I’d then have to code the language model… but it should merely be just an implementation and tweaking of algorithms like the HMM.

All of this just for a robot that can have many senses @_@!

Heheh I wrote quite a lot in this entry, especially when I had no clue what to write about.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

All Coding Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Woohoo! I fixed my soldering iron - it’s FANTABULOUS now! All I did was file it with an Xacto, and sanded it a bit. Now I can finally tin the tip (before I couldn’t) It’s amazing!

My two WiiChuck adapters are finished - I tried to make it work this afternoon, but for some reason the WiiChuck header file by Tom Igoe isn’t working!!! I’m confused… maybe it’s because I’m using Arduino 0012. I’ll be playing around with it more tonight.
The WaveShield is all soldered up I’m thinking about which song I should put on my SD card to test it out… hmmm

There’s so many fun things to do eeeeee all of them are now at the coding stage yay!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Fun Weekend Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 26th, 2008

This weekend is going to be pretty fun for me
I have soooo many things to play with, it’s going to be wickedly hyper awesome!

I went to the RobotShop and got my Lynxmotion SSC-32, Soldering station, and some female jumper wires, and a force sensing resistor!
The SSC-32 is awesome! I tried it out the other day, and my MANOI is ALIVE! I made it move its head
The only thing though is that I’ll have to power all the servos externally - which is okay now as I got a 12V DC transformer to plug into the breadboard
The soldering iron is horrible I was (and still am) trying to solder the Wave Shield, but the solder won’t stick to the iron So far it has taken me 3 hours (and counting) just to solder in the resistors. The iron doesn’t melt the solder, and the flux is GOOEY! It’s disgusting! I’m even trying lead solder (this stuff SUCKS) and it won’t work… going to try to sand the tip tomorrow, and see if it works better.

The old soldering iron literally exploded… so it’s in the garbage now.

I also bought a nintendo wii nunchuck (the accelerometer thing) to go with my WiiNunchuck Arduino adapters. I’ll be using it to control MANOI (and of course, many Processing programs)

I was playing around with the Fourier transform again today… and I somehow made it to morph time. It’s really freaky! I was recording sound, when my watch beeped. When I played back the sound (after the FFT alg) it was morphed… in a totally weird and unexplainable way XD kind of sped up, but also kinda moshed together…

This entire week I’ve been studying for the SAT. This pretty much involves me trying to sit in one place, focus on one thing, and not fall asleep/daydream for 4 ENTIRE HOURS! I just can’t stay focused that long… I make so many sleepy mistakes … I have absolutely no idea what to do. The real SAT is on October 4th (in 1 week) I’m not really in a panic as the test is so trivial and boring … I just can’t focus on one thing for more than 45 minutes! My brain is always in hyperdrive mode thinking about what ifs and whys… “Why exactly do they think this test evaluates your reasoning abilities” “What if they made this test interactive, like a game, on a computer?”

I’ve been asking what if and why a lot the past week… here’s some of the questions I can remember

What if time wasn’t measured in anything… but was just a continuous flow like a river
Why do we have to measure time?
Why do we always use graphs in two dimension? I don’t care about a squiggle function on a line… why can’t everything be graphed in 3 dimensions?
Why do we always round decimal points when it’s obvious it gives us inaccurate answers?
Why is the tinfoil on my lamp making high pitched noises like vibrations? Is it because of the heat… or did I just discover something I should look into further about light?
What if light had mass?
Why don’t we know what’s in/through a black hole?
What if we could make our own net of space and see how everything interacts with anything?
Why didn’t they put more corrector magnets into the LHC?
What if the computer isn’t monitoring enough information to really see what the Higgs is like?
What happens if they’re smashing the wrong particles together?
Why can’t they just model it on a computer?
Why is the LHC in a circle?
What would happen if it was in a spiral?
Why are my desks always messy?
What will happen when robots will become pets?
Why are people so judgemental about robots?
Why are robots stereotyped to be wirey and ugly?
What if the answer to better AI systems would be to create an “AI Internet” with many algs, and an API, to create a general AI?
What if cancer can be eliminated with the use of dandelions?
What if robots could code themselves and make better versions of their algorithms?
Why is random not random?
What if there were many robots in one square, and they were given random coordinates to navigate to and from? Would it be classified as swarm robots as eventually they will all converge?
What if I made a parrot robot that could read twitter feeds out loud, in a parrot voice?

So yeah… that’s pretty much the way I think all the time… I hardly can focus on one thing, ever!

Weeeee I can’t wait to get MANOI moving and waving this weekend!

Posted in: MANOI, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

Fancy FFT Effect in Processing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I created the visualization of a sound wave that I wanted to do for a while
I used Processing, with the minim library.

Here’s a video of it:

It’s based on the code by Tom Gerhardt Mine differs in the way that it “erases” (actually draws a black rectangle over the stage) some of the past blobs. This way it creates the effect of an actual live visualization of the FFT log average of the sound, rather than an average of an average.
Download the code here!

I’m going to try to see if I can make this my visualization of the sound wave through live input…

Posted in: Animation, Art, Other, Programming, Projects.

Stanford’s Version of MIT OCW

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 19th, 2008

Looks like Stanford has their own version of MIT OCW with some neat courses up! It’s called Stanford Engineering Everywhere.

I’m just looking at the Machine Learning course now… it looks pretty fun - definitely worth checking out
SEE

Posted in: News, Other News.

Pondering

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Recently I’ve been planning a few things that I want to post on my blog, and some other sites. Check out the list!

• Probability Intro & Bayes Theorem Tutorial
• Bayes Filter Algorithm Tutorial
• Bayes Filter Algorithm Example
• BubbleBoy Tutorial

I could extrapolate this idea into a special bloggy tutorial week where I post something each day!
Also in the works is my line following robot, and some acoustic modeling stuff. I’m pretty sure my method for the acoustic modeling will work well. Basically it will analyze the time where the waveform hits a 0, minimizes and maximizes. I’ll apply some sort of filter algorithm (not sure which one(s) yet) and then compare that result with a database of results, complete with the other mins and maxs. I can’t really explain it well yet, as it’s still in my head. After that I’ll have to implement the language model, which will choose the right word from the results of the acoustic model based on the previous words uttered and the topic!

From what I’ve seen… some recognizers are trying to skip the language model step by listening for specific phonemes in the acoustic model to try to figure out what the word is. Then, the LM’s job is to just ensure that that word makes sense in the sentence.

That process is overly complicated, all you have to hear are the words that are uttered- not all the phonemes. It is true that we don’t pronounce words the same… (nu-clee-ar vs nu-cu-lar) but essentially if one has an accent, the maxs and mins should still be comparable to the word in a “perfect” sense. (This is where the various filters and algs come in)

So yeah…

Thanks to Ron for donating $200!! It’s going to go towards a serial servo controller, a soldering iron and other things I’m so humbled by their generosity
It will definitely keep me occupied while I wait to go to university in January!

Posted in: Other, Programming, Projects, Robot.

BubbleBoy is not Characterful

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

FUDGE!
BubbleBoy did not win, nor PLACE in crabfu’s ‘Most Characterful’ competition.
I don’t understand how it didn’t… My source and schematics are even open!!
This extremely sucks as I wanted to win so badly as I don’t have the money to buy a serial servo controller Fudge!! Will MANOI forever be in a box? Talk about unethical treatment to a robot… (You wouldn’t keep a cat in a box* for a month would you?! why would a robot be any different?!)
* Schrodinger’s cat is an exception

I guess I poured too much creativity and florescent pink and lime green paint into it Grr! Either that, or it doesn’t even count as a robot since it doesn’t show its wires.
Although it is only “one contest” it was only an EXTREMELY GIGANTICOR SUPER DUPER CONTEST that I really wanted to win so I can work on my other robot so I can win other contests so I can pay for parts to keep researching robotics!!!!
sigh…

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!
The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Today…

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Today is a pretty happy day! It’s sunny out, and it’s my birthday! I didn’t get any presents, but that’s okay I did something that I wanted to do for a while now… I still haven’t finished blogging all of my pics from the Stanford EPGY SI AI trip!

The last place I went to while in California was the JPL! It was really amazing! Our tourer works on Deep Space. Uber cool!

Click continue reading to see the pics

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in: News, Other News.

More BubbleBoy

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 8th, 2008

Even more BubbleBoy awesomeness

And here’s the circuit diagram!

I hope I entered crabfu’s most characterful robot contest correctly. The deadline said: 09/08/08 at midnight — but it almost sounds as if it’s already closed and so now I’m so worried that I didn’t even enter and I won’t even be considered so therefore I wouldn’t stand a chance :’( I HATE TIMEZONES!!! :( Let’s just all hope that it is entered in the contest…
Update: Everything is okay. I’m entered in the contest!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.