RoboBrrd Cosmic Soap

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Creating art with robots usually ends up with a result that is unexpected from the beginning! I created this fluid dynamics + physics sketch in Processing that was fun, and sort of looked like the soap from space. I connected it with RoboBrrd, and it was super unreal the result that it created.

Watch the video on YouTube

All sorts of people have different ideas about what it is, it seems to change from person to person, which is really interesting With RoboBrrd, since the light is being shone into its “eyes” (because the LDRs are located close to the eyes), lots of people have said it like a RoboBrrd hallucination. I’m not so sure about this, but playing with it is lots of fun, and shooting some long-exposure photos creates interesting results

My inspiration for creating this was lack of inspiration. I couldn’t focus on more important things to do, but at the same time I didn’t feel like doing nothing.

You can look at the code on GitHub. It’s commented and annotated, so it should be a good starting point if you want to create something like this.

Oh yeah, and to maybe answer a question you might be wondering- I’m not “on” anything. The only thing I’m “on” is my computer 18 hours a day, coding and creating.

If you use this sketch or make something similar, leave a comment with your project! It would be cool to see how this translates into other robot art

Posted in: Art, Programming, Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Logomotionator

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Logomotionator is an App for the FIRST Robotics Competition 2011 that I created during the build season while helping out Team 296: The Northern Knights! You can download it on iTunes for free.

Here is the description of Logomotionator:

Logomotionator provides a way for teams to organize and collect their ideas about strategy and scoring during the 2011 FIRST Robotics Competition season.

Features:
- Fabulous user interface design
- Track the scoring for the red and blue alliance
- Up to 5 tubes per peg will be counted (in case some are deflated)
- Record which teams were on the alliances, their minibot scores and penalties
- View your saved scores and email them
- Draw strategic plays on the game field in red and blue
- Easily access the usfirst.org website

The FIRST Robotics Competition is a fantastic way to get youth interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Check out one of the regional competitions in your area to see what the future holds.

Inspiration for the App came about by the temptation of an Apple eMate 300 (an iPad of 10 years ago, basically)! I took in some feature requests and just started to work away at it. Making the calculator algorithm was fun

All of the coding was straight forward. I must be getting really good at making Apps or something. Making the game field drawing stuff was probably the part I most enjoyed:

I also really enjoyed the email stuff too:

The only rough spot was on the saved scores view, because the “Remove button” is actually in a different section, I have to replace it with an invisible cell when removing everything because of the protective UITableView cell math.

Once all of the functionality was there I wanted to make something that would really capture the energy that the competitions have. I figured it would have to look snazzy, so I paid close attention to detail when styling the App. On the iPhone 4′s retina display, the graphics look beautiful.

This is what the background looks like, I had a lot of fun making it!

This is my most complete App ever (so far). I really like the finished product. I can’t wait until after the season is over to go through some of the code with the programming students. It would be a fun exercise to break down the calculator algorithm!

I hope you enjoy it. There’s some more screenshots on flickr. Go download Logomotionator now! It’s free!

FIRST®, FIRST® Robotics Competition, FRC®, FIRST® Tech Challenge, and FTC®, are registered trademarks of FIRST® (www.usfirst.org) which is not overseeing, involved with, or responsible for this activity, product, or service.

Posted in: Art, FIRST, iPhone, Programming, Projects.

Simple Processing Twitter

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 21st, 2011

I created a really simple Processing and Twitter sketch to help a friend a few nights ago ^_^ It is based off of this previous code from the blog post “Processing + Arduino + Twitter + OAuth”. Here’s what changed:

- It now uses the Access Token that you can get from the Twitter App’s panel
- No more inserting PIN info into a file
- No Arduino clutter in the sketch
- Simple methods for posting, retrieving, and searching tweets.

You can probably do a lot more things with this too, thanks to Twitter4j.

If you use this code in one of your projects, let me know! It is cool to see what people make.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

Posted in: Art, Programming, Projects.

YELLING ROBOT!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Yelling Robot is a FREE Mac App that is an animated robot avatar which yells at you at regular time intervals!

The “yelling” capability is done through Mac OS’ speech synthesis Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine. It uses the “Zarvox” voice, since it is a robot.

It has a Questionaire for you to fill out, so that it can yell personalized phrases at you. It is almost like a “Mad Libs” activity, except that it actually says it out-loud through Mac’s TTS capabilities and you don’t see the complete phrases.

It is the most simplistic behavioural “robot” that you can get.

Please DOWNLOAD Yelling Robot and check it out. Leave a rating too!

I will have a video up soon, as I accidentally maxed out my Vimeo data with the BubbleBoy video, haha.

This was a quirky little Mac App that I created to share on the App Store when it is first opening. It is a fantastic day for the Mac OS, and software in general!

Happy Mac App Store Day!

DOWNLOAD YELLING ROBOT

Posted in: Animation, Art, Projects, Robot.

MERRY MANOI!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 25th, 2010

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday! Best wishes, robots, and intelligence for the new year!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

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, 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.