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
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 ![]()