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.

Zombial Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, April 1st, 2010

Based on results from a computer program executed last night, social robotics is NOT achievable.

All researchers should therefore shift focus to a more advantageous field of robotics: Zombial Robotics.

All robots on RobotGrrl.com will now be zombies. All social robots will be overrun by a zomboni machine.

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RobotGrrl.com- version 4.01

Posted in: Art, Projects.

MANOI-in-a-box

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Team 229 is heading to a FIRST competition this week- and since I don’t have three tests on one day I can actually go to this one! WOOHOO!

The location of this competition is one of the most awesome ones… APPARENTLY iRobot scouts people there. Meaning, they’re hunting for smart brains to hire during the summer. :XD: Even though I don’t roll with military style robots (they aren’t supposed to be sociable), that’s pretty cool, to be honest.

I figured that it would be awesome to carry MANOI around and just having it wave its arms, with a Team 229 flag (see picture above). I think some High Schoolers may enjoy that.

Transporting MANOI for the past few years has been a hassle… so we finally found a good box with styrofoam stuff in it! The styrofoam is actually really nicely engineered, because it comes cut into rectangles, which means that you can easily customize it. This is how MANOI fits in its new box:

There is room for MANOI’s basic needs in there- the batteries and charger, ping pong balls, USB cables… etc.

The outside needs more stickers, but I have the classic FRAGILE one, and a “Made with LabVIEW” sticker — even though it’s not even relatively made with LV. Hahahaha! I’m thinking of printing out a picture of an Arduino and taping it on there.

The other day, a member of CUARC with a dremel cut a hole in this metal box for me… Can you guess what is on the inside?

IT’S A MINTYBOOST! YAY!

This will provide MANOI’s microcontroller with the power that it needs while cheering on Team 229

I haven’t programmed the motions yet for MANOI, but I can do that in the hotel tonight. I’m thinking that the legs will be stationary, and just have the arms move around. Also thinking of using the Wii nunchuck to control which sensors are being read or something. I will indeed post the code when I make it! =)

Posted in: Art, MANOI, Projects, Robot.

CMUcam2 in Matlab! & Project updates!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

On Sunday, a breakthrough was made with regards to getting the CMUcam2 to send a frame back to Matlab! Amazing! It works!

Check out the screenshots:

(something bright was being shone onto the camera)

(lens cap on (yes they make lens caps that small))

It’s quite noticeable that the resolution is very small. In fact, it’s only about 10 pixels in size!

I started off small so that we could have something that works, then go from there. It’s only sending the green channel too, which helps improve the latency.

The way it works now is that it asks for a few hundred bytes of data. From there, we search through the array to find a 1, or the start of the frame, until a 3, or the end of the frame. This is stored into a new variable so that we can search through it (again!) and plot the data.

Plotting the data needs some improvement. Not too sure how to handle this yet– should I make a Processing app that will be able to save the image as a .png? Or can Matlab write images too? Hmm!

Post a comment if you want me to post the code, I just don’t want to post something that’s incomplete and will essentially confuse everyone.

Other projects statii:

PR2 Proposal

Out of the 120 Letters of Intent that WillowGarage received for the PR2 Beta program, one of them is one from Clarkson University!

There are ten robots that are going to be given away. Coincidentally, the research teams that win will be notified on March 26th — that’s the date of the Boston FIRST regional (which Team 229 is attending and is going to ROCK THE ROBOT HOUSE)!

We’re giving it our best shot, and it’s looking really cool! If you see me around, ask me about it!

This whole process has been super exciting. Our proposal is being wrapped up, though it’s only due March 1st (that’s in six days, we still have plenty of time). My two sections are pretty much complete except for some stuff. I’ll be blogging about it on March 1st at 8:00PM, so keep an eye out!

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Sociable Robotics

The Socializing a Social Robot with an Artificial Society SURE abstract from the summer has been added to the Honors Summer Research 2009 page! Finally! ^_^

Also, I refined my paper with logic that can easily be followed now, and included Zoomify graphs of the results. This makes it easy for readers to scan and interpret the graphs themselves. Plus, Zoomify graphs are always fun.

As for the code… I still have to get on to documenting it. It’s a lot of work, so I’m just getting through it step by step. Lesson learned: although comments are distracting when you’re working on the code, it’s horrible to go back and then spend time to comment it. Always comment. No exceptions!

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SecondLife Statistics Project

We finally parsed through the data and found something really striking. When the economic downturn in real life appeared, the usage hours on SecondLife rose, and kept on rising for a few months! The virtual economy was booming. It’s almost like as if people were tired of the real life, and wanted the easy success of the virtual world.

Though, there was eventually a decrease in the usage hours on SecondLife. This leads us to wonder if…
1) Is there a lag between RL and SL?
2) Did people notice that there weren’t as many opportunities on SL as when they first joined?

It’s really cool to think about this sort of stuff. It makes you wonder what Oreo sales have been like throughout this modern recession. I would love to study Oreo sales, I think they would be really representative of the economic situations. Either that, or Oreo sales always remain constant.

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Team 229

This build season I helped out with the website a lot. We were coming from nothing, and now we have a beautiful source of information, all collected together!

It was quite a load of work, however help from the teammates and mentors helped very much. Go check it out!

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Physics Team Design

In Physics II there are two lab sections that allow you to participate in a team based design course. The challenge is to model the velocity of a hobby train with given voltages. We do this using photogates… and a piece of National Instruments hardware that measures data at a rate of 400,000. I’m not sure what the units are, but it’s pretty amazing! The challenge sessions are where we apply this model, trying to predict the train’s movements based on the data that we have collected.

The way the data is collected is through LabView. Unfourtunately, the program that is used was deleted… so the professor/TA needed some help to fix it. After working on it for a few hours, we figured it out and got it to work!

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iPhone Stuff

I’ve been playing around with core-plot and working on an app lately- it’s 80% done, and will be out on the App store within the next few weeks!

We’re still trying to sort out if we’re going to Open Source it, and how that would work (since we want people to buy the App too…!). Perhaps we could just *suggest* a donation whenever people try to download the code? Anyone have any experience with Open Source App business model plans?

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Random

Coming back from winter break to school was tricky this time around… since I was outside the entire day playing hockey during the break!!! Although Clarkson has open skate, their ice mixture is really weird, and there’s no pickup hockey games Better than nothing, though.

I bought two shirts from shirt.woot, and they are awesome. One of them is ‘I Fought the Laws’, and has three pictures of crazy robots. The other is a robot that is plugged in to a wall outlet, leading to its heart. ^_^

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That’s all for now! Keep it real, humans and robots. =)

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

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.

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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!)

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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.