Unboxing Krafter’s Box!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 17th, 2010

From the Fat Man and Circuit Girl internet circuit reality show’s chatroom, a fellow member krafter boxed up a bunch of electronic goodies and sent them to me to prepare robots for epic world domination! I am super happy and thankful Let’s see what’s inside the box:

In here is conductive fabric, foam, thread and some conductive charcoal paint. There is also insulating tape, which prevents two circuit boards that are close to eachother from shorting out. The conductive paint will be useful to paint some lego for the RoboGlyphs project! The conductive thread and the fabric will be great for BubbleBoy’s scarf, as another sensor that can be used to influence it’s behaviour!

Shapelock! This is stuff that you can put into water and it becomes malleable, it’s completely awesome! It can be used to create gears, gearboxes, robot parts, whatever. I recently thought of a use that would be really fun, perhaps a lens adapter for my camera!

“Opto device” sounds totally robotic. A matching emitter and detector, these are great so that you don’t have to figure out what the frequencies of both components are so that they can be detectable and stuff. They’ll probably go onto Yoda Bot to detect obstacles

Bag o parts: inside there’s this cool segmented display. It looks like it will be hard to communicate to though! There are also 15 purple LED’s in here, and there are also photogates in here. A photogate can be used on TECHNOROBOT as an encoder for its antenna!

Screw shield! At the moment of unpacking it, I thought it would be great for MANOI, but it actually doesn’t fit. It is great on Yoda Bot, though!

Shield extenders, for adding another layer onto Yoda bot!

Dremel accessories, so that I can destroy things for a very long time!

Conductive tape! Not sure how I could use this yet…

An AC Dremel! So happy that this isn’t a battery one that loses power and strength too easily. Dremels are so cool. I can finally cut things now! I tried it with cutting a CD. It’s really cool. Can’t wait to destroy some other things with a Dremel!

An R2D2!!!!! Wowee!!! I just watched the three original Star Wars movies a few months ago, and changed the various sounds of my computer to beeps and whirrs mimicking R2. I was also in the middle of making a super cool AppleScript that would be an R2 TTS. Beep boop boop whirr! This robot is going to be so awesome to hack!

Aretoo where are you?

Dremeled a CD!

Behold the purpleness!

So yeah. More supplies to make more great robots! They have been very useful already. Thank you Krafter!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Crazy Computers?!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 16th, 2010

For some reason, this weekend (July 16th) all of my computers went crazy at the same time! My Macbook had a disk stuck in its drive, and the Mac Mini decided to spontaneously explode into madness when trying to remove a partition. The Mac Mini would not want to boot from the disk, either. It actually couldn’t understand any keyboard input at startup at all!

The fix for the Macbook turned out to be using a piece of cardboard to fish the disk out. It took a lot of patience and practice!

The fix for the Mac Mini was to take it to the Apple Store, where they used an older Apple keyboard (white plastic) and it worked perfectly, first shot. I’m not too sure why the aluminum keyboards don’t work the same. Heheh!

So here is a video of the TECHNOROBOT working, enjoy!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Mouser Chips Arrived! (FNR)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 25th, 2010

Hooray! I had a $50 prepaid credit card thanks to the Wolfram|Alpha “I want my money back!” program. Basically, I bought their iPhone App for $50, when I thought it was $4.99. Then they insanely dropped the price, too. I’m glad that they finally refunded us though, it is very kind and very modern of them!

I decided to buy 5 chips off of Mouser. 3 ATtiny85s, and 2 595-TLC5945PWPR 16-Ch LED Driver. The LED driver is a PWM shift out chip. It came to $15 bucks. Not too bad, right? Well, the shipping was $20. I don’t understand what was so important about the shipping. $20, seriously? OH and, I selected to pay the shipping at the door, but instead they took it off of the credit card! ARRG! So this is what my $35 went to:

1 sheet of bubble wrap:

Another sheet of bubble wrap:

Two more sheets of bubble wrap, and the electronics:

Fire pit material:

An ugly box:

Obviously that was not worth $20 of shipping. At least Sparkfun gives you a nice box that you can hack with!!! >:(

So the chips. YES! I cannot wait to see what these LED driver DIPs look like. Only the bag is sepperating me from these wonderful things now…

I open the bag, and this film reel thing slides onto the desk. What? I didn’t order a film reel?!

There’s two tiny chips inside of the film reel. But they’re NOT DIPs! I ordered a DIP because I don’t have a Weller! On the product it even said “DIP”! ARRG!

At least they got the ATtiny85s right…

So here it is. Two $5 chips and they aren’t even DIPs. I am royally doomed now. :’(

So yeah. I have no idea how I’m going to use these tiny things. I don’t have a precise soldering iron to make it work. Also, I have nothing to solder these things to! What on earth! I don’t want to go and do something extravogent, that’s why I bought the chips! All I wanted to do was drive LEDs! GRR!

Anyway, I checked out BubbleBoy to see what was going on inside of it with regards to the servos. It appears as though the wires attaching the servo to the head broke.

BubbleBoy would probably bob its head a lot better if the servos were attached to the head via metal axels. They’re only $3 at the local hobby store, so might as well buy the ones that fit this time instead of trying to aimlessly sand down the larger axels. It will be interesting to see how well the axels fare compared to the wire! ^_^ This will be a good time to refurbish BubbleBoy.

Posted in: Other, Projects.

Tuxdroid Unboxing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, April 2nd, 2010

One long and labourious night at the COSI labs, some people were browsing ThinkGeek. They found this robotic penguin, Tuxdroid, and thought it would be perfect for the labs! It was ordered… and now COSI has a robot penguin! It’s a robot of the symbol of everything open-source! Fantastic!

It took a while to get all the way from Belgium to COSI, and it arrived the weekend of Boston FRC regional – March 26th! Everyone resisted opening it in the labs to wait for me… I really appreciated that! =)

Tuxdroid is basically like the Nazbaztag. Tuxdroid can interface with multiple applications on your computer to provide you with a real-world interface to them. A few of which are Skype, Gmail, RSS, and internet radio.

Tuxdroid can flap its arms, close/open its eyes, spin around, open its mouth, blink its eyes, detect light, and play sound. It’s a pretty good set of features that can communicate messages!

One of the best parts though is that you can make gadgets for it that execute code that you write! You can write whatever you want, and you can use Python! Tuxdroid already comes with some useful gadgets though, like saying random Valentine sayings, Christmas carolling, a sense of humour, etc.

It’s also wireless, and can span from about the COSI labs to the Concrete Cafe. That’s about 20m, I’d say? The wireless transmitter is a fish (that is FIRIN ITZ LAZORZ11!1). It has blue LEDs in its eyes that blink when not connected to the Tux.

That basically covers the unboxing of the Tuxdroid. It’s a pretty spiffy piece of equipment that adds spice to any computer lab! Of course, it has secret plans to take over COSI too…

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

A HUGE WAVE OF BLOG POSTS IS ARRIVING!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, March 12th, 2010

I’m ghostbusting all of the blog zombies out of here to document all of the robotic awesomeness that has happened in the recent history! It’s spring break starting in a few more hours, which totally means MAKEation (a vacation where you MAKE stuff) time! I started this blarg because I wanted to have a record of stuff that I’ve done, so here are some posts that will be arriving, in rough order of future to past:

1. MAKEation Wrap Up (March 21, 2010)
2. Interval MAKEation posts (idk)
3. MAKEation Start! (March 13, 2010)
4. Projects Statii (March 12, 2010)
5. Half of Spring 2010 Photography (For some reason a ton of people on facebook love it when I post the photos that I have taken during the semester, so I figured I might as well post them on here too) (idk)
6. Where I’m at and Where I’m teleporting (aka: where i am and where i’m going – reflection) (idk)
7. Well-Read’edness in Social Robotics (idk)
8. The epic journey of installing ROS on Mac OS 10.6 (idk)
9. BAM! iRobot Create (March 9, 2010)
10. Creepy Furby Hack (FNR – March 5, 2010)
11. Tap-dancing Styrobot? (FNR – March 5, 2010)
12. CMUcam2 in MATLAB (March 2, 2010)
13. coreplot in iPhone Apps (Feb 24, 2010)
14. Proposed ideas for PR2 and ROS (March 1, 2010)
15. Robot T-shirts (Jan 14, 2010)
16. Antarctic Night – Robots from contest to classroom (Feb 11, 2010)
17. Ethical Dilemmas of the 3 Laws of Robotics (Nov 3, 2009)
18. MANOI Walking (FNR – Nov 13, 2009)
19. Girl Scout Robotics Activity (Nov 8, 2009)
20. Shaking hands with a robot (Nov 3, 2009)
21. Learning about ATtinys (FNR – Nov 29, 2009)
22. Elvis + iRobot (FNR- Nov 1, 2009)

w00t! =)

Posted in: Other, Projects.