Meters for Arduino is now available for iOS! You can get it on the App Store here:
http://itunes.com/apps/metersforarduino

It communicates with Meters for Arduino on Mac, which just had a 1.1 update. You can get it on the Mac App Store here:
http://itunes.com/mac/metersforarduino

Meters for Arduino on iOS works with the magic of Wijourno. Wijourno lets you communicate with your iOS devices and your Mac.

It’s a lot of fun, since you can send messages to specific devices, or broadcast a message to all devices. I’m imagining things where (for robots) you could have the iPad displaying lots of diagnostics and such, the iPhone would be the controller, and the Mac would be the data logger and connection to the internet!

Check out the apps4arduino site for more information, including some details on how you can use Wijourno in your own Apps. Can’t wait to see what people are going to make with this!

Learning Pet – Polymorph Phail, OpenSCAD and gEDA

To advance Learning Pet more, there has to be some sort of way to actually make these that doesn’t involve tens of hours of effort for each one. I was thinking maybe I could take a shortcut on this whole laser cutter/3d printer ordeal and use polymorph!

We created a stencil out of popsicle sticks:

First attempt was to lay the polymorph flat and use the stencil like a cookie cutter:

It turned out to be way to flimsy and thin. It would be more of a jello brrd than a RoboBrrd with the servos on it. Bah! Second try was to fill the stencil with the polymorph:

This was stronger in some parts, but it sort of broke at the top. Third attempt in the same way, but more better:

The third way is definitely strong, but it still takes ages to create. Not to mention, it destroyed the stencil trying to get it out. Plus, the polymorph extras are kind of hard to get rid of.

Polymorph is cool, but it may not be the best for creating the frame of a RoboBrrd. This is when I decided to learn OpenSCAD. Learning it isn’t that tricky. There’s some familiarities that you can draw from Matlab in there. The software itself is horrendous. You can rotate and zoom the viewer camera, but not translate, which makes it extremely annoying to try to use. Whatever. At least I don’t have to worry about trying to figure out what buttons on the screen to press to create a shape.

Here’s a screenie of an exploded view of the shapes that I created:

The school I mentor for FIRST robotics has a 3d printer, so we were going to print them out. This is them on the stl viewer. I like how it looks slightly Tron (original Tron) like:

They haven’t been printed yet, and actually I may not have the chance to pick them up if they were printed! But the idea was to experiment and see if the nubs would actually fit, seeing as how they are exactly the same size.

I learned later on about the same sort of technique with a laser cutter at Spikenzie Labs, you can read more into it in the next section

The boards are also going to be another thing to create. I’m attempting to try to learn gEDA (each time I try to pronounce the software it sounds like some sort of cheese), which is a PCB/schematics/board bundle of awesome! The learning curve for this though seems like a vertical line, it almost reminds me of Objective-C in that way. Which can only mean good things!

I didn’t save my original screenshot of playing with gEDA, but it looked like a board with chicken-pox, because there were lots of holes (which are called vias?). However, I was playing with text, and weird stuff happens with text. Depending on whatever colour you pick, it writes it normally, or it writes it flipped horizontally, so “w00t” becomes “m00f”, hahaha!

I couldn’t install gEDA on my Mac under fink or Macports unfortunately, but it works fine on Ubuntu. Oh yeah if anyone is wondering, the file I was playing with was the OHS badge. It’s cool. No idea how on earth they made the curved lines yet, but I hope to figure that out eventually. There’s lots of resources online about gEDA, so I just have to read them and figure it out, and climb this vertical learning curve ;P

There also has to be more software developed for Learning Pet, but I don’t want to go too crazy with it. I’ve been trying to figure out what platforms should be followed, and which ones should not. Or are we even at that point to make that decision? :/ I might just make some software for several platforms, then run some trials and see which ones are better.

Of course, Learning Pet itself is a platform! So it will also have to be able to play some *small* games. I’m looking forward to this part, like maybe I will save game data in an EEPROM or something? Or just save it in an SD card so that way it is more “modular”?

That’s about it for Learning Pet today. I’m working on a module where the sensor and button can sit on its own platform, making it have more of a purpose of working with a specific set of software. It will also have LEDs!

Spikenzie Labs

When I went in to visit my FIRST team, I also visited Spikenzie labs! Their laser cutter is awesome!

Here you can see some of the watch faces being cut out

They were also faced with the challenge of getting the slots to fit together. For them, they had to take into account the beam of the laser and all sorts of other interesting math. However, the result is nice slots that fit perfectly together:

This knowledge is great, and will definitely help This is the sort of technique that I would want to use in Learning Pet’s structure.

They also gave me free stuff. LOTS of free stuff!

More about building them in the next section. Thanks for the free stuff Andy & Mark!

Random Everything

The VoiceShield looks really cool. Unfortunately mine doesn’t play sounds, only noise. It may be because I’m doing something wrong with the uploading or something. I should also go back and check all the soldering. In concept though, it is really cool. It lets you upload sounds to this chip, and you’re able to play them individually or in sequence, which would be really handy for some of RoboBrrd’s sounds!

Soldered the MPTH kit too. It’s also pretty cool! Send in serial and have it displayed on the screen. Nice!

The LoL shield! YAY! If anyone tells you it only takes an hour to complete this shield, they are either a professional, or completely wrong. I had some trouble with a few LEDs, but it turned out that they needed more solder. There are also a few LEDs that flicker. I haven’t figured out how to fix them yet though. The white LEDs are beautiful!

This poem on the back of the LoL shield is so deep.

I gave one of the Propellers a go, and made it so that if I press gently on the button thing, then the LED will light up! However, these button things are kind of weird in the way that if you press down, then it shorts out (I guess), making the value 0. If you press lightly on the middle pad, the value ranges up to 1. The default value is also 0. So it is kind of hard to figure out, either that or I’m doing something wrong, which is most likely

I’m in the middle of trying to organize everything. It’s INSANE. Luckily it doesn’t look like this anymore, but I still have a few other things to organize away.

DOGCOW’s Ping))) sensor has sort of been a running joke on the Robot Party. Turns out it does work, I was just doing it wrong hahahaha

Here are my broken servos. This would definitely make a GREAT Christmas tree ornament!

And with that, moving on to the next section!

Old Popsicle Stick Constructions

Popsicle sticks and hot glue are great for creating things. Here are some things that I started to create, but haven’t finished. They were mainly created to let me visualize things that I was thinking about.

This robot was supposed to have LEDs spinning on its motor. It got me thinking about this design challenge, where you will have to somehow be able to power the LEDs even though it is spinning. If the LEDs were to blink, it would be better just to have the blinking circuit also spinning.

Here is proto-brrd. It’s skeleton served as a way to play around with the beak mechanism. It was also good to try the design before building the green RoboBrrd It always makes me laugh the way the bottom beak falls down…

This is a weirdo LED giraffe type of animal/creation. Its weak legs jittered around the desk as the spinning counter-weight tail moved, and as the head spun around. It was fun to see how fast the pennys flew off of the counter-weight sometimes.

Last was this interesting stretching armature thingamajig. It had an elastic to pull the two arms tight, but the motor would be able to push them apart. Since the motor didn’t have that much torque, it didn’t work that reliably.

Misc

I also visited Robot Shop headquarters. Had a tour of the place, it’s pretty cool!

My friend & inspiration Jeri (link goes to one of my favourite videos) is going to be in this film called Pinball Donut Girl. She’s really cool. I’ve had the chance to play some pinball, and it’s really fun. There’s a lot of electronics that happens behind the scenes too. The film needs funding, and it’s being crowdsourced. So instead of your coffee today, consider putting the money towards this! I only donated $7, but collectively it can get funded! YAH! GO DONATE NOW!

Last but not least, winter is fast approaching! Get out there and enjoy the autumn nature

When I heard about the Open Hardware Summit Scholarship contest, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. The prize would do more than wonders to get this idea flying. For example: A 3D printer would be able to be bought and used to create parts for kits. Also, we would have been able to order some custom PCBs online with the winnings, too.

When I heard about the contest later on that evening was when I started (Sept 8). I created the structure and beak mechanism all in that one night

The first day (Sept 9), the mini RoboBrrd character was crafted, and all servos and LEDs tested and functional.

The second day (Sept 10), the modular electronics board was created. Featuring a slide-out drawer for the Google Android ADK This was also my birthday! Hooray!

Third day (Sept 11), all of the circuits and wiring was complete. Had some pitfalls during the day trying to use different connectors, but switched to the ones you see below in the photo. The plugs are great, really sturdy!

Here’s a timelapse of some parts of the build:

Forth day was for creating the software and documentation, and submitting to the contest rather early. My train was leaving the next day, so I had to get everything done ahead of time

We didn’t win the contest, or place in the top 3. Somehow. So this became yet another unobtained opportunity, but I can definitely say that Learning Pet was a competitive entry. The documentation webpage was a force not to be reckoned with compared to the other entries. Learning Pet has a purpose that would benefit society. Furthermore, I created a demo prototype for the video about my idea.

Maybe some people will think that it was crazy to pour in all this dedication to one robot. If it would have won, it wouldn’t have seemed crazy. Success is defined as getting up one more time than you’ve been knocked down. I’ll still be continuing with Learning Pet, the idea is exciting and education desperately needs an effective use of technology in the classroom, rather than more technology in the classroom.

Thanks again to everyone who left a comment on my Google+ during the build progress! And thanks to the FIRST team that I mentor, COSI, the gang from FMCG, and all my friends for voting!

Also: I used some parts (the large servo and two RGB LEDs, specifically) from the parts that Adafruit Industries sponsored for the original RoboBrrd, so thanks to them also

Before the summit started, we were sitting at the sculpture robo-busking for votes! At that point, Ian came over and wanted to do an interview! It was an excellent interview, and he uploaded it really quickly at the summit so we could get more votes for the scholarship! Thanks Ian!

I actually did go to some of the talks! Specifically, the ones in the morning before the break. The Arduino Team’s keynote was really really great!

After that, I sort of hung around the cafeteria area showing off Learning Pet! A lot of people said they would vote, which was really great! After the crowd died down, I went into the cafeteria area to watch the stream and maybe work on some ADK stuff.

That was when the creator of ThingSpeak himself caught me and said Hello! ThingSpeak is a really cool Internet of Things website. It’s relatively small and new, which is why I like it compared to the others.

He told me about the location data parameter in the API. I never knew this existed! Then I was wondering how to get the location from Mac OS, if there was actually a framework for that. It turned out that there was! Wow! And it was since 10.6 too! I never knew this! Making it work was really great, it was only checking to see if it worked was what we really got caught on (because the XML file goes from oldest to newest).

It was then when I saw David Cuartielles from the Arduino team when I waved, who joined the table. We were talking about Learning Pet, and it turned out that he was the one who created the Processing ADK Tool! Wow! What a cooincidence!

I told him about all of the bugs, and asked how I can fix them. He showed me the code for the ADK tool, and walked me through how to build it in Eclipse! Building a tool for Processing is a little different because you have to tell ant that there are some things that are already pre-compiled, so it doesn’t have to check them.

I played around with the code for a while and sort of got used to the way things work. There are some places where it will be tricky to be able to do what I want to specifically do.

We also tried to figure out why there are four parameters on the Arduino side, and only three on the Android App side. It turns out that the Arduino is the one telling the Android what App it needs, rather than the other way around. This means that of course the Arduino side needs the description and website parameters. Which I guess makes more sense in retrospect

I’ll definitely be helping out more with this Processing ADK Tool stuff. The thing that motivates me the most is that when I first got the ADK and Android, I figured that this should be about 10x easier and 50x quicker than making an iOS App. It wasn’t, and many other people feel the same way, but now it is my goal to make it so.

We did listen to some of the talks while we were down hacking and learning on some code. They were really good! I didn’t manage to get to the breakout session, but they were all sort of scattered and I wasn’t listening to the directions anyway… playing with the code was more fun.

Oh yeah! And I also bought a hackerspace passport from Mitch Altman! It is so cool to see them in real life, they look like a real passport!

The Demo session was fun, lots of people loved Learning Pet and also said that they voted for it! However, when they announced the winners, Learning Pet didn’t place in the top three. I really appreciate everyone voting, though. To be honest and somewhat egotistical, I think Learning Pet’s documentation was the best and most complete. No one even came close!

Here is a video by johngineer about Learning Pet! Thanks johngineer!

The one thing that I would improve though, is to make the organizers a little more friendly towards everyone, and not just caring primarily about the sponsors. Yes, it is important to make the sponsors feel good since without them then there wouldn’t be this event, but it is also important to make the people at the summit itself feel good also. For example, at the demo session one of the organizers was talking with all of these sponsors in front of my demo area and goofing around and taking photos, but never bothered to say hello or ask about my project. It was sort of uncool and unmakerly (if that’s a word). The way I think of it is… you might as well be friendly to everyone, because we are all in this together!

All in all, the Open Hardware Summit was great for connecting with some of the people I have met online! It also turned out to be a great learning experience for building tools for Processing, and seeing how the Processing ADK tool actually compiles with API v10 rather than v7 (it is literally just setting the number different hahahaha)!

Also, Learning Pet appeared in the Adafruit blog randomly! It was awesome!

Featuring my robots!
MANOI- the hockey playing robot
RoboBrrd- the virtual food eating robot
Dogcow- the robot that is driving around randomly
Mini RoboBrrd aka Learning Pet- learn how to sort numbers from lowest to highest *and* blast UFOs!

We will be located in Zone A, the Robot Square!

Also, check out Jonah and Katherine’s Scrapyard Challenge talk! It will be an excellent source of information about creating an event in numerous places in the world. Truly amazing and inspiring, and they may mention RIP Banff too!

We hope to see you there!

Here was a fantastic interview by Ian Cole, thanks so much Ian!

The future of Learning Pet is that there will be time spent on apps4arduino to make some money in order to be able to purchase some laser cut parts, 3d parts, and boards.

Here are some stats of the contest that I collected from the webpage:

- 51.9% had a prototype
- 48.1% showed a demo in their video
- 51.9% had a website
- 3.7% released their hardware files under a license for the open hardware definition
- 22.2% had their hardware files available
- 14.8% had a bom
- 5.6% released their source code under an osi license
- 22.2% had their code available
- 40.7% had documentation
- 22.2% had additional videos
- 59.3% said what they would do with the prize if they won
- 18.5% demoed while at the ohs

You can check out all the documentation for Learning Pet here:
http://robotgrrl.com/learningpet

Thanks again!

Learning Pet will be at the Maker Faire this weekend, so be sure to say hi! (or whatever hi is in robobrrd language)

Introducing Learning Pet, a mini RoboBrrd with a very large theme- education! Learning Pet enriches lessons by creating a physical interface to interact with the virtual world.

We demonstrate a number sorting game, where the student interacts with the robot to blast virtual UFO’s with the lowest value. Correct answers are celebrated with a wing flap, and each level-up with a dance. We use the Accessory Development Kit to interface with mobile devices while away from the computer.

On LearningPet’s webpage, it has all the detailed information about the hardware, software and design. There is also a handy checklist at the top, so that at a glance you can quickly see the important facts.

It would be awesome if you could vote for Learning Pet in the Open Hardware Summit Scholarship! VOTE here!

Here is a YouTube playlist of all the videos!

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

Here is a video where I explain everything in detail!

View video on YouTube

Here is a link to the code on Github!

What is next? For WWDC 2011 legacy sake, I will probably try to drive DOGCOW robot with the iPhone’s accelerometer. This time though, the cable would be attached to an XBee so that it will be wireless.

Dogcow now works with the iPad without the use for a middleman in between! It goes straight from the App to the XBee for Dogcow to receive.

Here is a video explanation:

Or view the video on YouTube.

The process begins with an App using the ExternalAccessory framework:

Then goes through the SkyWire cable:

RS232 is converted to TTL:

Which is then sent through the XBee:

The XBee is powered by 3.3V, using an Arduino as a simple power supply haha:

And Dogcow receives with the XBee:

Making this whole process really cool!

Here are some resources that may be helpful:

• ExternalAccessory framework
• EADemo Code
• SkyWIre 30 pin to RS232 cable
• Sparkfun RS232 to TTL
• More photos on Flickr
• Also FYI, the baud rate is 9600 on the SkyWire cable

Also, as per Technote #31:

Dogcows, by their nature, are not all dog, nor are they all cow, but they are a special genetic hybrid. They are rarely seen in the wild. Since dogcows are two dimensional, they will stand facing a viewer “on edge” to avoid being seen.