Friday Night Robotics – Feb. 27ths

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, February 27th, 2009

In all actuality, Feb.27th was quite a while ago!

Friday was a pretty funny day. In the morning, it looked super beautiful because of how blue the sky was! The tree branches really stood out on the sky, and it looked really interesting.

Turned out though, as the day progressed… I remember walking to ARC and it was raining out. No problem there! I always enjoy looking at people who think that they are going to melt because of rain… Then after I leave the ARC there’s like 10cm of snow on the ground! Hahaha

A few days previous to this FNR, one of those bendy lamps broke. It was placed by the trash and looked very sad and lonely! I rescued it, deciding to make a robot for ARC.

Here is a video of the final product!

At first it was pretty tricky to decide where the servos would be placed. I chose a few random points and decided to go with that. After trying a proof-of-concept servo mockup, it turns out that those DOFs would not work because the bendy part was not bendy enough.

Instead, I mounted the servos at the top of the lamp. There’s only two DOF, however when you have only 2 DOF, you always have a very large window of opportunities. The best part of 2 DOF is when it looks comparable to a human nod (yes) or shake (no) of the head.

This part is the no (left/right) DOF

It is mounted securely with oodles of hot glue. However, in the video it shows that servo before the servo horns were attached together with hot glue. (Hence why it fell off- in the video)

This is the servo horn for the top part – backwards/forwards to create a ‘yes’ effect. I had to sand it down a bit to make the horn parallel to the lamp surface. It often popped off when it started to move, so that’s why there are popsicle sticks. They attach to the inside of the lamp.

So all in all, here are the servos mounted on the lamp! Cool eh?

The lamp is held down with a relatively massy mass. I think it has sand in it. It works very well!

There were times in this FNR where I was just waiting for glue to dry, so I also did some other stuff! I looked up this lil’ guy and how to make him work (notice how I just gave an electronic component a gender, but I can’t bare to give a gender to a robot… weird o_o) Turns out, I need a breakout board with lots of diodes and stuff. Blerg! Hahahaha. He is once more going back into the “stuff to do when…” box.

There was also this thingy- it is 2×4 orangey-red lights. I think it can be used for the lamp robot… like have the robot listen to 8 questions, and each of the lights lights up when a question is asked. Hahaha! I am concerned though that these are lamps because they are really really really hot when I put 5V (from the Arduino) into them.

I also wired up these LEDs… they all work, and are very prettyyyy!

The other thing that I did was I posted up the rules for RICC, the webpage of RICC, the webpage of RoboGames, and the Events page of RoboGames. I don’t think that the ARC will participate in RoboGames. RICC would be a very possible “maybe”. See, I am not the leader of the ARC – I don’t have control.

This last picture is just a nice picture I took of wires…

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Flying Club

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, February 26th, 2009

The Flying Club shares a room with the Autonomous Robotics Club (or more like the other way around haha). They are all very nice people, and their planes are absolutely stunning.

Here is a video of them flying planes:

Here’s a picture of three of the planes they were flying

I took a few pics of Adam’s plane- it flies very nicely!

There is a set of photos up on Flickr.

It was pretty neat to see the planes actually fly. Can’t wait ’til the next time.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

MANOI’s Numerous Tune-ups

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

MANOI has been moving around lately. I’ve been bringing it from one place to another, which does have some wear and tear on the wires.

The first time I tried to bring it somewhere to show everyone, it was super cold and a lot of the wires snapped! (It didn’t work) =P

MANOI regularly has trouble with one of its servos, which is also completely annoying.

Currently, MANOI’s servos are either connected by the servo cable itself, or there are jumpers. These jumpers can be tedious at times as they can fall out, and not work. At this point, what MANOI really needs are real servo extension cables.

Thanks to a donation I received, I am ordering 7 of them! Hopefully they will be here by Friday.

I’m also trying to adjust the center of gravity again. I have to find a better way of attaching the Arduino and SSC-32 together, and then attaching that to its back.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

MANOI’s New Glove

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

The ridiculous set up between MANOI’s hand and hockey stick demanded to be changed.

I actually thought (and kinda came up with the idea along the way) of how I wanted to do this.

I knew that I wanted to have it so that I can disconnect it, but it also needed to be strong.

I prototyped on styrofoam that was from Femsapien’s box.

It wasn’t strong enough, so I looked around for something else. We’re in a room full of planes that can crash land and survive, there must be something! In the corner was blue stuff that felt like styrofoam, but more sturdy.

I guess this is the part where I kinda get in trouble… I took about a 8cm by 4cm piece from it (someone already took a chunk out of it, and it didn’t look nice, so I thought it would look nicer this way (I think it does! (I just hope I didn’t ruin anything))).

I started carving away, I made three pieces.

The first piece attaches to the hand. The second piece attaches to the first piece and the back of the hockey stick. The final piece attaches the second and front of the hockey stick together.

It looks and functions way better than the mad mess of tape!

I also added lots of glue and some velcro along the way.

After testing it, it definitely concluded the question in the back of my head (whether it would need a connection back to the hand, to keep it sturdy). It did… it was going to break after prolonged use without a connection back.

There are lots of popsicle sticks in the room, so I chose pink (not my FAV colour, but close) and glued it on. I also found a snap, which I glued on to the end of the servo motor.

The wires for the LEDs and LDRs also have a quick disconnect now, too

It works very well. I can now remove the stick with ease. =)

MANOI extremely enjoys it!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

FEMSAPIEN ARRIVES!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

WOOT!

It has been a long awaited day… the arrival of the Femsapien!

I won the Femsapien through a contest on Robots Podcast. The contest was to guess what the Femsapiens did while in Switzerland, and the answer was skiing! I really wanted to win, so I created a drawn animation with many guesses. Luckily, I guessed skiing and it was right!

The box has an awesome sticker on it!

That raised many eyebrows when people saw it.

The Femsapien looks very awesome and powerful. Almost as if she would laser beam someone who bugs her.

Unwrapping it reminded me of the way Barbie dolls are wrapped. They have these black plastic clips with intense wire wraps, “chaining” the doll down. For the Femsapien, it was the same thing, and equally EXCRUCIATING to unpack! It took a good 20 minutes to get to this stage:

I finally got her unwrapped. It is an awesome robot! I feel a little silly switching from she/it all the time… what would you classify this robot as? I call MANOI an it, so shouldn’t I call Femsapien an it? Or would that be offending not only the Femsapien, but humans as well? Hmmm…

I still don’t really understand how to make it walk and stuff. I like it when it dances though, the music is so funny It takes 3 AA batteries in each foot (that totals to 9V). I wasn’t expecting to need that many batteries! That’s a lot!

Anyway… I need to play with it a bit more

What I found REALLY cool though was how GREEN it is.

When you move a DC motor, it generates power. Usually, this power is sucked up by a diode.

However, in the Femsapien, this power is used to light up tiny red LEDs in her arm. That is SO COOL!

So, even when the Femsapien isn’t on, you can have lights.

Thanks a bunch Robots Podcast! I really appreciate this.

I think I will start hacking this on Friday-ish. I still want to play with it beforehand

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Femsapien + MANOI

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, February 14th, 2009

This wasn’t actually taken on valentines day, but I think it is a good day to back-post this picture on.

Happy Valentines Day!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Friday Night and Monday Day Robotics – Moved!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, February 13th, 2009

This Friday was pretty interesting. All that was done was some work on two servo motors to create wheels for a simple robot that I want to create one day… but the main part was all of the packing!

All of the robotics stuff that I wanted to bring fit into two boxes! This was very convenient.

Everything got across the border just fine.

When Monday came, it was time to move everything in to the room of the Autonomous Robotics Club (at the University that I go to).

I really like the location of the club =) It’s right next to a dining place, seemingly the only one on campus that has tacos, fajitas, and quesadilas! ^_^

There’s a window, too. You can see the really nice view <3

I like the trees!

It took a total of 4 trips to get everything from my room to the ARC. See:

The cool thing about the ARC is that it shares the room with the Hobby Planes club! I like those planes a lot, they are all really detailed too. I know someone who makes hobby planes back in Montreal.

One of our first projects is a party button. So far there’s only a few members of the club. To attract new people to the club, we need to spice up the idea first… so what better to do than a party button!

The party button will be based on the famous MIT one, except ours will have more interactive things (like MANOI, BubbleBoy, and more). We’ll also have some funky lighting going on too.

I started adding some of the shiftOut chips to my shiftOut breadboard…

However, there is a giant problem! I connected everything, blah blah blah. BUT part of the wire broke off inside of the Arduino header!

Does anyone out there know how to fix it without making the Arduino deformed?

It’s quite sad to see an Arduino like this. If I can’t get it out, it would be deprived of the joy of shields… SPI… shiftOut… and more…

All in all, this weekend was super fun! I just wish I didn’t catch this whatever cold. I’m over it now (Tuesday) almost. At least I can speak again! Joy!! =)

This is the cabinet of mysteries (not really)

Posted in: Other, Projects.