Friday Night Robotics – MusicBox!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

This Friday I had the most awesome idea of a weekend project ever! A 21st century MusicBox, using an Arduino and have blinking LEDs!

I had a Sparkfun box lying around, which is an ideal size for an Arduino and a WaveShield.

I wanted to have LEDs outlining the box, so I went to work on it:

Just as a disclaimer- I designed it wrong, so the LEDs don’t work well. If you’re looking to follow my steps, DON’T DO IT!

Then, installing them into the box:

It looks nice!

Once all of the connections are made, it’s pretty tight in there:

The problem though, is that I designed it so that all the LEDs are in series. Since al LEDs aren’t created equally, some suck up more power and therefore can’t share it with the others. This is what happened:

It’s pretty sad! But, I think that I can fix it because I soldered the resistors together, not the actual LEDs together. I was too excited to start this project, so I didn’t bother to plan =) I guess planning would have been better, but it would also have been too boring.

I also worked on a NXT LED blinky thingy. There are these HiTechnic Protoboards that you can get, and basically you attach them to one of the sensor inputs, and you can control power to certain ports and such.

In this case, there’s 6 output pins that you can control. Sounds like an opportunity to use LEDs to me!

This is what the setup looks like:

It goes like this: NXT -> HiTechnic ProtoBoard Sensor Adapter -> 6 LEDs

In order to output instructions to the HiTechnic ProtoBoard, you need ‘drivers’, or headers. They’re located here.

Here is the code for the LEDs, in RobotC:

This is what the code does:

To wrap up this Friday Night Robotics, I checked out the Adafruit Ask an Engineer chat. It was pretty cool! I learnt about how LEDs work, and how much it costs to create a Teenyduino! Everyone should check it out, Saturday at 10:00PM EST.

The only things that I didn’t get to do that I wanted to was play with MANOI and the iRobot Create. I’m kinda worried that MANOI’s batteries are drying out as they haven’t been exercised in a while :S EEP!

Posted in: Art, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Autonomous Robotics Club Meeting – Call for Electronic Junk!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

This past week, we received the Blue-Bomber TGIMBOEJ! It came from Toronto, Canada. Here’s the blog post of the original creator of the Blue-Bomber box.

A TGIMBOEJ is a box of electronic junk! It stands for: The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk. People put electronic junk into a box, usually take pictures and blog it, and send it to someone else. The process repeats and repeats. The general rule is that if you take something out, you have to put something back in it. Possibly the most awesomest thing to explain to anyone who hasn’t heard of one before! ^_^

This is what it looked like when we got it:

There is awesomeness inside:

This one is my favourite thing in the entire box:

Do you know what it is? It’s a NEWTON PEN!!!!!!!! A PEN FROM THE NEWTON!!!!! (A Newton was the first PDA, the pre-iPhone)! A NEWTON PEN IS IN THE BOX!!!!!!!!!! Rest assured, I’m going to be swapping something in for that.

(That giant resistor makes me laugh)

So that was some of the junk in the box. The pink flower camera is still in there. The funny thing is about that camera, is that I have one at home, and it still works. Hahaha!

One of the projects that was going on that night was someone (also a robotics floor member) was trying to open up an old computer that he bought on ebay for $0.99! It’s a Packard-Bell, and it’s really old, but uncannily looks like the netbooks of today:

Above is the battery for the laptop. They didn’t even try to make it not look like a capacitor!

I think at the end of it, what was wrong is that the CMOS battery is dead. I’m not sure why he hasn’t replaced it yet, but I think it’s along the lines of he doesn’t have one (that isn’t dead). It’s a pretty cool project, neat to see what others are doing!

Anyway, when I got the BlueBomber I sent out an email to the ARC members requesting electronic junk, so that we can have a lot of stuff to swap out. The amount of junk we received was phenomenal. It was MOUNTAINS of electronic junk. MOUNTAINS OF JUNK!!! It was a super giant electronic junk party!

This is what a CRT actually looks like without the box:

This is what a human actually looks like with the box: (Rofl)

There’s so much soldering/desoldering to be done! I can’t wait to continue the electronic junk party this Monday, and perhaps work on iSobot more. One thing is for sure- I won’t be forgetting the desoldering pump!

If you have some electronic junk or know of people with electronic junk, feel free to let me know and we’ll take it off of your hands. Eventually the stuff that we don’t use will either be used for a new TGIMBOEJ, or will stay in the ARC room!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Robotics Floor = Closest thing to paradise!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

A while ago, I was on the internet TV show – Fat Man and Circuit Girl! At that time, when I showed the robotics floor, we only had a camera and a desk. Now we have everything on the floor, and it’s virtually the closest thing to a paradise!

The robotics floor is basically a group of people that all really enjoy robotics- we’re all on the FIRST 229 team. We help out with 229 related activities, like remote mentoring. Basically any team that is in our county can call in and ask for help on their robot. I really like the feel of remote mentoring, it’s like being on-call for a robo-emergency. There hasn’t been any calls yet, though The fancy name for the floor is ‘Living Learning Community’… or LL Community. We would say LLC, but I was the nerd who pointed out we could easily be pwned for that, especially if someone had a company called Robotics LLC or Team 229 LLC. Plus, it’s just generally confusing if people look on the website and see a LLC, it wouldn’t make sense- so it’s LL Community. =)

This is the phone we use for remote mentoring. We’re going to be switching to VoIP soon, though:

We have a huge computer that has two displays, an extreme amount of graphical processing power, can record TV shows and has a Netflix account. It’s an amazing computer. The keyboard and mouse are really nice, too.

On top of this, we have a huge smart board! It’s really amazing! It stands up and has a projector sort of floating in front of it. You can touch the screen and it’s like your clicking!!! I tried some of the Processing applications that I made, and it works really good, and the particle finger painting looks extremely realistic!

We also have this intense camera! You can move it around from the internet, and it can zoom in super far, it’s creepy!!!

This is what it looked like with people in it, when it was in its most fire hazardous messy lego state:

It’s much cleaner now, though.

So yeah, that’s the Robotics Floor. I haven’t heard about this type of awesomeness at any other university, so Clarkson has done this first! Woohoo!

So, this floor is so super amazing, but what’s the worst part of it? I’d have to say the respect that the people on the floor have. There’s so little of it that it’s somewhat disgustingly sad

The main problem I have is Quiet Hours. For some reason, everyone on the floor doesn’t understand what QUIET means. So this means that I have to do the RA’s job and tell everyone to shut up, EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. I’ve tried being nice, angry, mean, aggressive, sad, happy, ignoring it, and telling the RA to shut everyone up, but nothing works! They don’t have the courtesy to respect anyone that likes to wake up at the beginning of the morning. How can such an amazing floor have that little respect for its floormates? It disappoints me and bedaffles me!

If I didn’t have respect though… I would play classical music super duper loud on my stereo, each morning, at 6AM. >:D But I haven’t done it yet, because I have respect. I respect people that don’t respect me… that doesn’t make sense. :S

Anyway, during the day this floor is the most amazing place on Earth!! This is what I see out of my window:

I hope that the bad part of the floor will improve, but it’s still the most amazing thing ever.

Posted in: Art, Projects, Robot, School.