Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 25th, 2010

Hooray! I had a $50 prepaid credit card thanks to the Wolfram|Alpha “I want my money back!” program. Basically, I bought their iPhone App for $50, when I thought it was $4.99. Then they insanely dropped the price, too. I’m glad that they finally refunded us though, it is very kind and very modern of them!

I decided to buy 5 chips off of Mouser. 3 ATtiny85s, and 2 595-TLC5945PWPR 16-Ch LED Driver. The LED driver is a PWM shift out chip. It came to $15 bucks. Not too bad, right? Well, the shipping was $20. I don’t understand what was so important about the shipping. $20, seriously? OH and, I selected to pay the shipping at the door, but instead they took it off of the credit card! ARRG! So this is what my $35 went to:

1 sheet of bubble wrap:

Another sheet of bubble wrap:

Two more sheets of bubble wrap, and the electronics:

Fire pit material:

An ugly box:

Obviously that was not worth $20 of shipping. At least Sparkfun gives you a nice box that you can hack with!!! >:(

So the chips. YES! I cannot wait to see what these LED driver DIPs look like. Only the bag is sepperating me from these wonderful things now…

I open the bag, and this film reel thing slides onto the desk. What? I didn’t order a film reel?!

There’s two tiny chips inside of the film reel. But they’re NOT DIPs! I ordered a DIP because I don’t have a Weller! On the product it even said “DIP”! ARRG!

At least they got the ATtiny85s right…

So here it is. Two $5 chips and they aren’t even DIPs. I am royally doomed now. :’(

So yeah. I have no idea how I’m going to use these tiny things. I don’t have a precise soldering iron to make it work. Also, I have nothing to solder these things to! What on earth! I don’t want to go and do something extravogent, that’s why I bought the chips! All I wanted to do was drive LEDs! GRR!

Anyway, I checked out BubbleBoy to see what was going on inside of it with regards to the servos. It appears as though the wires attaching the servo to the head broke.

BubbleBoy would probably bob its head a lot better if the servos were attached to the head via metal axels. They’re only $3 at the local hobby store, so might as well buy the ones that fit this time instead of trying to aimlessly sand down the larger axels. It will be interesting to see how well the axels fare compared to the wire! ^_^ This will be a good time to refurbish BubbleBoy.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

KiloWhatt iPhone App!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

An App that I’ve been working on for several months now has finally been released onto the App store! It’s called KiloWhatt! The purpose of KiloWhatt is to assist in the general understanding of the relationships between power, energy, usage and cost.

Once these relationships are understood, the ultimate goal is for people to observe which categories they consume the most energy. Decreasing our energy consumption to conserve as much as possible based off of this understanding will be very efficient and effective. As the Law of Conservation of Energy states:
“Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to another”. ^_^

Building this App was definitely a tribute to the incremental development approach. It started off from a simple SQLite3 todo list! I kept adding on more aspects once one thing was working. Though, at one point it did seem like there was more debugging going on than actual development. That’s learning, I suppose.

When I was finishing off the App, a lot of time was spent on the design. The table views have nice backgrounds and overlays, so that you don’t get that standard iPhone UI feel when you’re in the App. The App needed something nice so that people can show it off to their friends as something different!

Another thing- the Info tab on KiloWhatt does exactly what the name entails. It gives you more information! There’s sections in there to read about the various components about the App. The info section is definitely a vital part of any App, and I hope that this is more fulfilling than a simple version number and website info page.

Of course, there are still some improvements to be made. These will be coming with version releases. =) Oh yeah, and the little icon for the ‘Electronics’ category intentionally looks like an iMac G4 (haha)!

With that being said, go and check it out on the

App store

and let me know how you like it. =)

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

Finishing the RoboGlyphs Project

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, June 12th, 2010

Just the fun stuff was left for this project! Here is a photo blog montage of the journey to the finish

The first thing to do was to put the black foam backing onto the RoboGlyph. I wasn’t really sure how the glue would look, so I placed a minimal amount on the corners. Next time I do this, I’m going to put glue all over the back since it created a neat effect with the sparkles on the foam. It sort of makes them more sparkly…

Cut the excess foam away with the Xacto knife. Cutting it on a slight inwards angle towards the glyph is much better than a 90 degree cut, I found.

To mount the RoboGlyphs to their board, I used toothpicks on the back. This is what it looks like from the front:

Zoomed in:

The toothpicks fit nicely in the holes of the perf board. I found that if you put glue in the perfboard hole, then put the toothpick in, it will stick better.

They’re all tilted forward because they don’t have a proper footing yet! =)

Again, from the back:

At first I was thinking about using some rubber feet to keep the RoboGlyphs standing, but I didn’t have any on hand. The next best thing: Lego! Plus, there is something else that I can add on to the Lego to make it even more interesting…

The “more interesting” part would be tinfoil! Tinfoil is a conductor, and therefore can have a charge running through it.

It’s quite a difficult task to manage to put the tinfoil onto the Lego bricks. This try was using hot glue. When another brick is placed on this one, the tinfoil splits.

I tried using a simple glue stick, and it actually works much better! The tinfoil does not split when another brick is placed on top of it.

Putting tinfoil inside the brick is much easier.

While the glue is setting for the tinfoil, it’s time to wire up the RoboGlyphs. Thanks to the super simple colour coded wires, the process took a matter of seconds. The Sanguino only has 6 PWM pins, and there are no PWM drivers in my pocket, so the green LEDs will not be controlled by PWM.

Green is probably the best default colour!

Red:

Blue:

The edge lighting is really cool, even though I didn’t really do it very precisely. You can’t really tell from this photograph, though.

The Lego 2x4s were glued on to the bottom of the boards. Then they’re placed onto the tinfoil-coated Lego brick. 5V is applied through an alligator clip!

The other end goes into an Analog In, where the Sanguino checks to see if there’s anything there. If nothing is there… The lights don’t turn on!

There’s a few finishing touches that I have to make. I’d like to connect it to Twitter via Processing, and have it as a permanent setup. I also have to fix the Lego connections, as right now it can only tell if the middle RoboGlyph is disconnected! =)

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Friday Night Robotics – Gyro in MANOI’s Back

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 11th, 2010

Friday, June 11th, I originally wanted to work on BubbleBoy and the swashplate, but it seems as though the axels that I bought ages ago were too big. They could only fit in the big servos, but BubbleBoy uses micro servos.

MANOI’s gyro and accelerometer were in need of being more securely mounted, and the area in MANOI’s back is a great place to mount them. You can hardly see them, but the gyro is mounted on the right wall, and the accelerometer is mounted on the back wall. There’s a piece of foam in there to protect them, and keep them more secure.

The Serial Servo Controller (SSC-32) is what is mounted on top of these, and it was previously only attached to MANOI by velcro. Now there’s some wire tied through its waist and through the SSC-32 to hold it in place!

That was about it for that Friday. The readings from the accelerometer and gyro are definitely less jumpy, and MANOI’s center of gravity is moving around less now.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Grabbing MANOI’s Accelerometer and Gyro Data

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Last FNR I embedded MANOI’s Accelerometer and Gyro into its back. Usually what people do first when they add these motion sensors is make their robot self balancing. For now, I’m going to see if I can do something a little cooler.

The idea stems from a Fast-Fourier Transform result for sound- where you can see the various volumes and such. (Check out my Processing Fancy FFT). What I’m aiming to create is a FFT for motion. Basically, if you move MANOI around, the algorithm will be able to detect a pattern and do stuff afterwards. Essentially what this is leading up to is an interesting dancing robot. =)

I’m starting off with a Processing program that will visualize and log the data (see above screenshot). I envision a split-view display with two cubes. One will be showing the live sensor input, the other will be showing the results of the pattern algorithm to the live data.

No idea yet how the algorithm will turn out. I’m probably going to start at a very basic level, and perhaps add complexities on later. It will be interesting to see how this will turn out!

Soon to be blogged…

• The FNR that I mentioned, but didn’t blog about
• RampageRobot!!!
• RoboGlyphs

Posted in: Programming, Projects.

Advancing on RoboGlyphs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Around June 8th and 10th, more stuff was done on the RoboGlyphs project.

The boards were painted black…

Which actually looked quite dazzling when dry:

The wires were soldered in, too. Also, the wires were colour coded too!

Thus, the final product!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

RoboGlyphs Project

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, June 7th, 2010

I was looking through some of the things I had lying around the other day, and I found my old RoboGlyphs!

Check out my old posts about them… beep boop

It feels like I never quite did a good job with them. They’re really pretty pieces of plastic, they deserve better! Another thing that I have been noticing lately is that there are many primarily electronic add-ons for Arduinos. What about just plain old accessories with a main function of looking artsy? I’m thinking that the RoboGlyphs (when I redo them) will be able to be one of the first “more art than electronic add-on” for an Arduino.

The plan is to have an RGB LED illuminate the RoboGlyph from below. There will be a female header on the perf board so it can be interfaced with an Arduino, or just a circuit of some sort. There will be black sparkly “felt” (it’s not really felt, but I have no idea what it is called) covering the front of the LED part, so it looks as magical as possible. The RoboGlyph will be backed by this felt also. I’m thinking of using toothpicks or something rudimentary simple to hold the glyph in place. I’ll probably use rubber feet on the bottom of the perf board to keep it sturdy.

This is the black sparkly “felt” that I’m talking about:

The first thing that I’m going to do to start this project off are the perf boards. They are all measured for the RoboGlyph.

I wanted to make sure that they were smooth, so I spent time sanding them down…

The end result is very smooth! It will be very unlikely to get a perf board cut from these

This is where I intend for the RGB LED to sit:

That’s it for now! Later on I’m going to paint the top of the perf board black (to match the black sparkly “felt”) and afterwards solder in the LED and header. =)

Posted in: Art, Projects.