January Happenings

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 1st, 2010

What has happened in January? Tons of stuff!

For Matlab this semester, it’s an independent project. I’m working with a friend to implement an adaptive online SLAM algorithm for an iRobot with a CMU cam and ultrasonic sensor. We want it to be able to reach a goal location even if objects are placed in front of it. I’ll be blogging more about this later, though.

The Social Robotics software that I worked on over the summer is now released under the GPLv3 license. I encourage everyone to check out the Social Robotics page if you want to learn more about the project! I am still in the process of creating the documentation and commenting for the code. As soon as it is complete, I will make a blog post.

Luckily for me, I took time to make detailed daily and weekly summaries. This will help a lot, plus it’s always neat to look back and see what the difficult parts were.

Did you hear/watch this year’s FIRST game animation? The game is about soccer! Team 229 has many useful links on their webpage that can fill you in.

This year I’m helping out with the website, maybe I will get to help out with some AI coding for the autonomous mode later on. It all depends on what the high school students think up!

I ended up adding a class two hours before the first lecture- Applied Statistics I. I don’t enjoy statistics very much since I have horrible memories of it from Math 536. But, once I gained access to view the class on the gradebook software, I immediately noticed two words:

SecondLife ……………… Project

Is this for real!?!?! It turned out that it is, and it is awesome! A friend and I are working on trying to figure out if there is a correlation between the virtual economy and the real economy. We’re going to focus mainly on North & South America, Europe and Australia.

Here’s a screenshot of my professor in SecondLife!

I’m taking a class on Computer Graphics. It’s really neat– I’m learning OpenGL!

OpenGL is something that I’ve wanted to learn for a while now. It’s actually quite simple when you’re given a template to work with!

Above is the first homework assignment! We were given a lot of time with it, which allowed me to play around with the code. I have to make the colours more plain before I hand it in, though.

I have no idea what I want to make with OpenGL at the moment. Maybe a moving robot? I definitely want to make some sort of game, though. (That way I can sell it on the iPhone App Store!)

That’s all for now. I’ll be blogging more about the Matlab project, since I think it’s going to be a hit!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

Friday Night Robotics – MLK Day Preparations

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Warning: This FNR does not contain any robots at all, but it’s still REALLY amazing!

A while ago I put my name on a list that wanted to help out with MLK day, 2010. I originally thought I would be doing a website, not really thinking about the intractability portion. When the Fall 2009 semester began, the group of us met, and ideas were tossed around. MLK Day in 2010 had to be different.

We came up with the idea of having a Twitter aspect of the performance. People would be able to tweet from laptops and then see it displayed on the screen! We are going to be using 5 laptops throughout the dinner, each with a different theme:

• Inspiration
• Dedication
• Culture
• Leadership
• Performance

When a person goes to send a tweet, this is what the webpage looks like:

It’s very user-friendly in the way that… once a person reads the theme and the question, they’ll understand to type in the box and press the button. I designed it to be simple, hopefully people will think it is simple too.

Being projected onto the display will be the Processing application that I’ve spent the better part of 4 months coding! :O It displays three twitter accounts at a time, and they are refreshed every 10 seconds and cycled upwards. The background changes very slowly over time as well, it’s almost not noticeable. Here is a screenshot:

The best part about this is… it will be open source… in about 1 month. I just need to take some time to document it before I release it to the wild. Since it wasn’t a project for grades, I didn’t comment it (I find comments get in the way), so I will have to do that. Hopefully people will pick it up and improve it, since there’s some parts in the code that it’s obvious that I had no idea what I was doing.

So that is the MLK Twitter portion of the dinner. I’m really amazed how well this is all going to work together, it will be a very special moment for sure. I had the privilege of seeing the performance being rehearsed, it is extraordinary! If it is going to be recorded, I will be sure to post a video.

I hope everyone has a wonderful MLK day!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Other, Programming, Projects.

Particles in Processing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I finally finished off the “Define Dancing” Processing artwork that I started a long time ago! The reason why I didn’t finish it back then was because the colours were messed up. I figured them out, and while playing with the colours, I created another program called Particle Finger Painting

Here’s the Define Dancing one…

You can move your mouse around, and one particles will stay with it. All of the other particles are attracted to it, but some are stronger than the others. Plus, there’s forces between all of the particles too – some of them are negative, which results in “fireworks”-like collisions

Here’s the Particle Finger Painting one-

I really like this one… it’s the same as the Define Dancing one, but the layering and transperency of the ellipses are different.

They both use the traer physics library for the particles.

Try the live ones out- they’re probably laggy since it’s in a browser. In that case, you should download Processing and try them out. It’s a good IDE to have anyway!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Programming, Projects.

Fancy FFT Effect in Processing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 20th, 2008

I created the visualization of a sound wave that I wanted to do for a while

I used Processing, with the minim library.

Here’s a video of it:

It’s based on the code by Tom Gerhardt Mine differs in the way that it “erases” (actually draws a black rectangle over the stage) some of the past blobs. This way it creates the effect of an actual live visualization of the FFT log average of the sound, rather than an average of an average.

Download the code here!

I’m going to try to see if I can make this my visualization of the sound wave through live input…

Posted in: Animation, Art, Other, Programming, Projects.

Summer Xtravaganza Day 2

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 27th, 2007

Another day of fun Habbo stuff yesterday.

^ Video “summary” of the events.

Posted in: Animation, Projects.