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!

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!

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.

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…

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! =)

Check out the screenshots:

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

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?

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. ^_^

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

A while ago I put my name on a list that wanted to help out with MLK day, 2010. I originally thought I would be doing a website, not really thinking about the intractability portion. When the Fall 2009 semester began, the group of us met, and ideas were tossed around. MLK Day in 2010 had to be different.

We came up with the idea of having a Twitter aspect of the performance. People would be able to tweet from laptops and then see it displayed on the screen! We are going to be using 5 laptops throughout the dinner, each with a different theme:

• Inspiration
• Dedication
• Culture
• Leadership
• Performance

When a person goes to send a tweet, this is what the webpage looks like:

It’s very user-friendly in the way that… once a person reads the theme and the question, they’ll understand to type in the box and press the button. I designed it to be simple, hopefully people will think it is simple too.

Being projected onto the display will be the Processing application that I’ve spent the better part of 4 months coding! :O It displays three twitter accounts at a time, and they are refreshed every 10 seconds and cycled upwards. The background changes very slowly over time as well, it’s almost not noticeable. Here is a screenshot:

The best part about this is… it will be open source… in about 1 month. I just need to take some time to document it before I release it to the wild. Since it wasn’t a project for grades, I didn’t comment it (I find comments get in the way), so I will have to do that. Hopefully people will pick it up and improve it, since there’s some parts in the code that it’s obvious that I had no idea what I was doing.

So that is the MLK Twitter portion of the dinner. I’m really amazed how well this is all going to work together, it will be a very special moment for sure. I had the privilege of seeing the performance being rehearsed, it is extraordinary! If it is going to be recorded, I will be sure to post a video.

I hope everyone has a wonderful MLK day! =)

Friday, the FTC competition was amazing! FTC is FIRST Tech Challenge, and it’s where middle school and high school students build robots out of metal and some lego parts. The brain of the robot is an NXT, and they can program it in either RobotC, NXT-G, or LabView with the NXT toolbox.

The field is 12 feet by 12 feet, and this year’s challenge is called HotShot! The robots have to score wiffleballs into the zone in the middle, the nets above the zone, or the containers off to the side of the field. The wiffleballs are released onto the field when a holster tube is pushed. Yellow wiffleballs are better than white wiffleballs.

There’s a 30 second autonomous mode at the beginning of the game, followed by a teleoperated mode. The robots are controlled by a logitech controller that has joysticks and buttons (hahaha, what a lame description), which goes into software called the Field Controller Station. This software is on the laptop that the team supplies. The software then communicates via Bluetooth to the robot.

On the technical side of things, the Bluetooth works great if you have one robot. If you have 40 robots connected with Bluetooth, the air gets too cluttered. We ran into some problems the other day when robots started moving on their own and some teams would be disconnected if they switched from autonomous mode to teleoperated mode.

Problems or not, it was fun. Apparently it ran more smoothly than it did last year, so that was fantastic! Plus, one of the teams that I was helping gave me one of their team t-shirts! The music was great, and the event was streamed live from WCKN onto the internet!

There are 79 pictures that were taken live at the event up on team229robotics.com.

The FLL competition is today, Saturday December 5th. You can tune in to the live stream right here and subscribe to team229robotics.com’s RSS feed to have updated live blogging images as they come in!

Here is what I have been up to the past 4 weeks (in chronological order from oldest to newest):
- Got serial data (from BubbleBoy’s LDR) to go into Matlab very easily
- Read lots of robot books
- Wrote a paper on the ethical dilemmas of the 3 Laws
- Got iRobot to work (drive in a straight line)
- Got MANOI to walk
- Worked on a presentation for the paper
- Programmed MANOI to shake hands for the presentation (and I did this like 5 hours before the presentation and had a potential disaster, but it worked in the end)
- Worked on a cookie mover robot
- Got a CMU cam
- Ran a Girl Scouts Robotics Activity (cookie mover robot)
- Working on a MATLAB program for BubbleBoy that can make it speak, play songs on iTunes, use AI
- Working on a Processing sketch that displays RSS feeds, nicely

That’s 12 blog posts that I have to write! They are all really cool too… I think the programming MANOI to shake hands will be the funniest blog post.

This also means that I have achieved a goal that I have had for 3 years… MANOI can walk!

I’m also continuously working on improving my code from the summer that socializes a social robot using an artificial society. One of the main differences is that in the summer it only worked for 1,000 iterations. Now the program can do over 1 million iterations… until infinity! So I have to make the patterns more evident and last longer… which is a trial and error thing, really.

More later!

A TGIMBOEJ is a box of electronic junk! It stands for: The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk. People put electronic junk into a box, usually take pictures and blog it, and send it to someone else. The process repeats and repeats. The general rule is that if you take something out, you have to put something back in it. Possibly the most awesomest thing to explain to anyone who hasn’t heard of one before! ^_^

This is what it looked like when we got it:

There is awesomeness inside:

This one is my favourite thing in the entire box:

Do you know what it is? It’s a NEWTON PEN!!!!!!!! A PEN FROM THE NEWTON!!!!! (A Newton was the first PDA, the pre-iPhone)! A NEWTON PEN IS IN THE BOX!!!!!!!!!! Rest assured, I’m going to be swapping something in for that.

(That giant resistor makes me laugh)

So that was some of the junk in the box. The pink flower camera is still in there. The funny thing is about that camera, is that I have one at home, and it still works. Hahaha!

One of the projects that was going on that night was someone (also a robotics floor member) was trying to open up an old computer that he bought on ebay for $0.99! It’s a Packard-Bell, and it’s really old, but uncannily looks like the netbooks of today:

Above is the battery for the laptop. They didn’t even try to make it not look like a capacitor!

I think at the end of it, what was wrong is that the CMOS battery is dead. I’m not sure why he hasn’t replaced it yet, but I think it’s along the lines of he doesn’t have one (that isn’t dead). It’s a pretty cool project, neat to see what others are doing!

Anyway, when I got the BlueBomber I sent out an email to the ARC members requesting electronic junk, so that we can have a lot of stuff to swap out. The amount of junk we received was phenomenal. It was MOUNTAINS of electronic junk. MOUNTAINS OF JUNK!!! It was a super giant electronic junk party!

This is what a CRT actually looks like without the box:

This is what a human actually looks like with the box: (Rofl)

There’s so much soldering/desoldering to be done! I can’t wait to continue the electronic junk party this Monday, and perhaps work on iSobot more. One thing is for sure- I won’t be forgetting the desoldering pump!

If you have some electronic junk or know of people with electronic junk, feel free to let me know and we’ll take it off of your hands. Eventually the stuff that we don’t use will either be used for a new TGIMBOEJ, or will stay in the ARC room!