Archive for the 'Projects' Category

BubbleBoy Finished

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on September 4, 2008
in Projects and Robot
. 1 Comment

Yay! BubbleBoy is finished (version 1). Briefly, BubbleBoy was created to demonstrate emotions and their applications in robotics. BubbleBoy has a food and water level, and when averaged out, a health level. The mood is determined by the health level. There are 10 moods, each of which BubbleBoy has a little ‘action set’ with. This is to try to get more food! After the ‘action set’ is over, you can feed it or give it water. When the food/water button is pressed, it increases the food/water level by a random int in between a lower bound and upper bound. Also, when BubbleBoy finishes three ‘action sets’, it becomes more hungry and thirsty - thereby decreasing the food/water levels. So, BubbleBoy is similar to a ‘tamigotchi’. It was fun to make- BB has 2 servos, 2 DC motors, 2 buttons, 4 LEDs, 1 LDR, and 1 LCD. All of these are controlled by the Arduino board. :)

The source code is here! There are no comments in the code yet (they’re all in my brain at the moment, haha).

Although I said (on Wednesday) that this was going to be posted tomorrow… it’s actually early Friday. BUT, since I haven’t slept yet, it’s still Thursday to me :] I had so much trouble getting the footage from the tape recorder onto the mac! It seemed to be like technical difficulty after technical difficulty the entire time. I’ll post more details tomorrow about the schematics… to be honest I forgot if I used pull up resistors or not! So I have to check…

All the awesome pictures! The plastic was painted green, and the push buttons were created :)

BubbleBoy in the spotlight Filming BubbleBoy haha LED Labels Water Button Food Button HulaRing! Closeup! BubbleBoy’s Eyez BubbleBoy LCD BubbleBoy

There’s BubbleBoy! :)

The future versions will employ ‘expectations’. For instance, when BB is fed, it will record the LDR value. If after three action sets and the LDR value is the same… it will expect to be fed! If it’s not fed, then it will become more hungry or thirsty since it was somewhat ‘disappointed’ because it wasn’t fed. :)

Schematics and fancy vocabularized blurb tomorrow :)

BUBBLEBOY TOMORROW!

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on September 3, 2008
in Projects and Robot
. 0 Comments

Tomorrow I’ll be finishing off BubbleBoy, posting the schematics, the code, pictures, and videos! ^_^
Woohoo!

I might even write a fancy shmancy few paragraphs about how scientific it is. :)

Robots on the Moon

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on September 1, 2008
in Other and Projects
. 3 Comments

Recently I’ve been thinking about swarm robotics and the potential they could have on some of our other planets. Do we really know everything there is to know about the Moon? We have lots of data… but are there underlying details that are still hidden?

Instead of spending trillions of dollars on a gigantor research project, a few billion dollars could send some robots to the moon. The robots could have the ability to drill, evaluate the dirt, and ‘laser beam’ rocks like the MER. It will also have cameras on it :) I’m kind of envisioning about… 2.5 times the size of Sojourner.

About 12 of these robots could be placed on the Moon. When one of the robots find results that are ‘interesting’, a few robots that are close to it will become closer, evaluating where else the interesting results lie. Each of the 12 robots could have different ‘accessories’ on it too, so that they’re all not evaluating the same thing.

Course, it could also be applied to other planets- like Mars, or maybe they could be sent out to Triton. That would be kinda cool!

It would be simple, and autonomous. The results obtained could potentially trigger new information, which could lead to a more precise robot, which could lead to new discoveries. :)

Sounds like I have even more research to do! :D

Dormant Blogging

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on August 29, 2008
in Projects and Robot
. 0 Comments

Dormant blogging kills the robot star xD

BubbleBoy is doing good- and looks EXACTLY like a pink snowman with the scarf, which is what I was aiming for. :)

The coding is going good… it’s all really simple :P Check out this video of cycling the health levels. For health >= 90 there is an action, but the others there isn’t yet because I haven’t programmed it yet teeheehee.

The video is really slow… as the delay between cycles was 10 seconds xD At the end you’ll see BubbleBoy’s ‘behaviour’ for health >= 90. :)

Stuff!!

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on August 20, 2008
in Other, Projects and Robot
. 3 Comments

^_^ Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

  • Arduino
  • 2 ProtoShields
  • Arduino bootloader
  • Multimeter
  • Boarduino
  • Motor Shield
  • Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day ^^;

Stuff!! New Arduino

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! :o Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map :D The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first… :)

Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer :D

Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

BubbleBoy’s Hello World!

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on August 18, 2008
in Projects and Robot
. 2 Comments

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. :D

I’ve been working on BubbleBoy a bit, and I’ve got it to a state where it is Hello World! :D

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. 8)

Table with BB! Inside of BB - these wires kept popping off! LCD117 Board connected to the LCD in a messy way LCD in Box Pull-up LDR Perfboarded Shot of the box Other button in box Button in box Top view Woohoo!! Wires - tidyish EYES :D

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.

Lots of grounds available, ahah More wires! Other DC motor circuit … I actually made many mistakes making these! But fixed them eventually 3V pls! ;P More wires Servos inside For the DC motors This needs to be shrinkwrapped, ahah 2 LEDs in :) 1 LED in!

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. xD

More wires! Lots of grounds available, ahah More wiressss Battery bundle hatch! Wirez MORE!! More more more wires!! Baha! Standing up! More wires … Fatal error… LOL

The last photo, above, was when I realized I forgot to plug in the Arduino xD

There we go :) It’s crowded in there! Everything all together :) Had trouble with a DEAD DC motor for the hat, and I had to replace it! Which meant soldering in there :o It works!! The transistor wasn’t bad… it was the DC motor! Added longer wires for the servos :)

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! :D 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! ^_^

Sightseeing Around

Published
by
Erin, the RobotGrrl
on August 13, 2008
in Other and Projects
. 0 Comments

I think I have been stuck in a bubble for a long time judging by how long it has taken me to post this- more pictures from my trip to Stanford :) It is mainly the Golden Gate Bridge and Capitola Beach. The Golden Gate Bridge is pretty amazing in real… I wonder how much paint it needs per year?! As for Capitola Beach, this was one of our outings for the first Saturday. It was okay, a bit of an ugly beach though. The weather was cold… water was cold… everything was very cold! :P The ice cream was good though. Oh yeah- I wrecked my camera at Capitola Beach because of the water and the sand. It was pretty sad. But I picked up a better camera at Best Buy, for a really cheap price, so it was pretty cool! :D
There are also some pictures of De Anza drive and… APPLE! ^_^
Click continue reading for all the pictures :)
Continue reading ‘Sightseeing Around’