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.

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.

Advancing on RoboGlyphs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

Around June 8th and 10th, more stuff was done on the RoboGlyphs project.

The boards were painted black…

Which actually looked quite dazzling when dry:

The wires were soldered in, too. Also, the wires were colour coded too!

Thus, the final product!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

RoboGlyphs Project

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, June 7th, 2010

I was looking through some of the things I had lying around the other day, and I found my old RoboGlyphs!

Check out my old posts about them… beep boop

It feels like I never quite did a good job with them. They’re really pretty pieces of plastic, they deserve better! Another thing that I have been noticing lately is that there are many primarily electronic add-ons for Arduinos. What about just plain old accessories with a main function of looking artsy? I’m thinking that the RoboGlyphs (when I redo them) will be able to be one of the first “more art than electronic add-on” for an Arduino.

The plan is to have an RGB LED illuminate the RoboGlyph from below. There will be a female header on the perf board so it can be interfaced with an Arduino, or just a circuit of some sort. There will be black sparkly “felt” (it’s not really felt, but I have no idea what it is called) covering the front of the LED part, so it looks as magical as possible. The RoboGlyph will be backed by this felt also. I’m thinking of using toothpicks or something rudimentary simple to hold the glyph in place. I’ll probably use rubber feet on the bottom of the perf board to keep it sturdy.

This is the black sparkly “felt” that I’m talking about:

The first thing that I’m going to do to start this project off are the perf boards. They are all measured for the RoboGlyph.

I wanted to make sure that they were smooth, so I spent time sanding them down…

The end result is very smooth! It will be very unlikely to get a perf board cut from these

This is where I intend for the RGB LED to sit:

That’s it for now! Later on I’m going to paint the top of the perf board black (to match the black sparkly “felt”) and afterwards solder in the LED and header. =)

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Boggled Blogged Bogg (with Photography!)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, May 3rd, 2010

There’s been no recent blog posts because first there were projects to finish and exams to study for… then I was in a car accident… and now I have to restudy everything again.

In the meantime, here’s some of my recent photography to look at! =)

Have a great day! ^_^

Posted in: Art, Projects.