Friday Night Robotics – Yoda Bot Extender Shield and R2D2

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, August 20th, 2010

Y O D A ! This Friday Night Robotics I added an extra shield to the Rampage Robot, aka Yoda Bot. BUT I also did some other random things during this week. No computers though, all hardware this week.

The plan is to take this stackable robot design, and actually add a layer to it!

From the shield extending headers that I received from Krafter’s big box and some protoboard that I have hanging around, this should be a pretty simple task. This is the finished product!

Not sure about the center of gravity with Yoda sort of hanging off the back of the robot. This will probably have to be tested. It would be nice if it is offset from the center just enough to produce some cool wheelies!

Some other things that I did that week were…

Bought some rechargeable D cell batteries for Artoo!

The amount of detail that was put in to this robot toy is so amazing, it’s really cool. Check out the sparkly gold “wires” on its feet!

When I eventually hack Artoo, I’m going to do it by splicing the wires, because I still want the “original” Artoo to be operational. Check out Artoo wearing my NASA JPL cap!

Here’s a video of some of the things that Artoo can do already:

Testing Out R2D2 from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

The next thing that I did was paint the Lego for the RoboGlyphs stand to be conductive. This is using the conductive paint that Krafter sent in the big box!

The paint smells really bad, I highly recommend painting it outside.

For the second coat, I did indeed paint it outside:

That’s about it. It dried, but I’m a little worried about the cracks between the bricks. I’ll measure the resistance with an Ohm Meter next time to see if it is continuous!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Unboxing Krafter’s Box!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

From the Fat Man and Circuit Girl internet circuit reality show’s chatroom, a fellow member krafter boxed up a bunch of electronic goodies and sent them to me to prepare robots for epic world domination! I am super happy and thankful Let’s see what’s inside the box:

In here is conductive fabric, foam, thread and some conductive charcoal paint. There is also insulating tape, which prevents two circuit boards that are close to eachother from shorting out. The conductive paint will be useful to paint some lego for the RoboGlyphs project! The conductive thread and the fabric will be great for BubbleBoy’s scarf, as another sensor that can be used to influence it’s behaviour!

Shapelock! This is stuff that you can put into water and it becomes malleable, it’s completely awesome! It can be used to create gears, gearboxes, robot parts, whatever. I recently thought of a use that would be really fun, perhaps a lens adapter for my camera!

“Opto device” sounds totally robotic. A matching emitter and detector, these are great so that you don’t have to figure out what the frequencies of both components are so that they can be detectable and stuff. They’ll probably go onto Yoda Bot to detect obstacles

Bag o parts: inside there’s this cool segmented display. It looks like it will be hard to communicate to though! There are also 15 purple LED’s in here, and there are also photogates in here. A photogate can be used on TECHNOROBOT as an encoder for its antenna!

Screw shield! At the moment of unpacking it, I thought it would be great for MANOI, but it actually doesn’t fit. It is great on Yoda Bot, though!

Shield extenders, for adding another layer onto Yoda bot!

Dremel accessories, so that I can destroy things for a very long time!

Conductive tape! Not sure how I could use this yet…

An AC Dremel! So happy that this isn’t a battery one that loses power and strength too easily. Dremels are so cool. I can finally cut things now! I tried it with cutting a CD. It’s really cool. Can’t wait to destroy some other things with a Dremel!

An R2D2!!!!! Wowee!!! I just watched the three original Star Wars movies a few months ago, and changed the various sounds of my computer to beeps and whirrs mimicking R2. I was also in the middle of making a super cool AppleScript that would be an R2 TTS. Beep boop boop whirr! This robot is going to be so awesome to hack!

Aretoo where are you?

Dremeled a CD!

Behold the purpleness!

So yeah. More supplies to make more great robots! They have been very useful already. Thank you Krafter!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – CRAZY stars

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 30th, 2010

On Friday July 30th, I completed an App that I have been working on that uses openFrameworks to draw points (or combination of points) to the screen. Using openFrameworks is a great resource in case you don’t know the Core Animation APIs too well, but you have experience with other drawing programs, such as Processing.

The idea originally started out as a pinwheel application, but somehow evolved into exploding stars.

There is also an Open AL layer that creates interesting sound effects as you draw across the screen. Here’s a video of me explaining the App in action!

The App was submitted to the App Store for review on August 1st, so it might be up on August 10th! I will be sure to post an update when it is available. The App will run only on the iPad, and it will be free. You can do an in-app purchase for $0.99 to unlock the customization features.

If there are 1,200 downloads of the App in 3 weeks from when it is released, I will make the code open source under a CC-BY-NC-SA license. You will have to tell all of your iPad friends about the App!

Posted in: Art, Projects, iPhone.

Refurbishing Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The missing parts to the TECHNOROBOT kit that I got at the explOratorium during the Stanford EPGY AI Program in 2008 have been found! This robot has been transformed many times, the first as an idea/prototype for an emotional line following robot, then a snowplow, and now it will be an XBee messenger robot!

Refurbishing it was OK, it only took 4 hours. The only thing that was drastically broken was the drive axel. To fix it, I used some Lego axels.

The robot now uses an Arduino, and is powered off of USB. The motor is driven with the Adafruit Motor Shield (I plan to add more motors to the robot someday). The motor is powered from an Adafruit mintyboost.

I broadcasted the refurbishment to the Fat Man and Circuit Girl stream, AND took a photo every 5 seconds! You can see the HD timelapse on Vimeo!

The next steps for this robot is rather short:

• Make a battery pack for the Arduino
• Attach XBee
• Mount an ultrasonic sensor, program a simple behaviour
• Transmit messages, listen to messages

Can’t wait to blog more about it!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Crazy Computers?!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 16th, 2010

For some reason, this weekend (July 16th) all of my computers went crazy at the same time! My Macbook had a disk stuck in its drive, and the Mac Mini decided to spontaneously explode into madness when trying to remove a partition. The Mac Mini would not want to boot from the disk, either. It actually couldn’t understand any keyboard input at startup at all!

The fix for the Macbook turned out to be using a piece of cardboard to fish the disk out. It took a lot of patience and practice!

The fix for the Mac Mini was to take it to the Apple Store, where they used an older Apple keyboard (white plastic) and it worked perfectly, first shot. I’m not too sure why the aluminum keyboards don’t work the same. Heheh!

So here is a video of the TECHNOROBOT working, enjoy!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.