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!

TECHNOROBOT Moving Around from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

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.

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.

Friday Night Robotics – MLK Day Preparations

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, January 16th, 2010

Warning: This FNR does not contain any robots at all, but it’s still REALLY amazing!

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! =)

Posted in: Animation, Art, Other, Programming, Projects.