Gumball

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

I added a new Processing thing I made… called Gumball.

It’s not that cool, but great to play with for like 20 seconds. =P

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Friday Night Robotics!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 15th, 2008

This is my Hockey MANOI work in progress robot. It needs a lot of improvement before I actually take it outside (hopefully there won’t be snow by then). It’s using a plastic stick that I found lying around (check out the pics)

So far it’s going okay, I guess. Trying to make a robot balance with many moving parts is difficult though, and really exhausting. There’s lots of things that I’ll need to fix… The program is basically a sequence of movements:

- Forward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times
- Backward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times

The Forward and Backward movements do vary slightly, but they both result in the robot going backwards. I’m trying to think of a way to fix it that will be the best way, like attaching a few heavy rocks to the front of the robot won’t be the best way in this case. Once the robot shoots after going Backward, there’s too much movement and it falls over.

I’ll probably have an if statement in the Shoot movement asking what was the last movement. If it was backwards, the shot will be more slow and less intense so it won’t tip over.

The stick also has to be mounted better… it moves WAY too much =P (those tie wraps serve no purpose)

Despite all of the falling over, it’s fun to be trial’ing and error’ing to see how the robot can balance And it’s working off of an Arduino! I plan to add the Wave Shield, with some hockey sounds/songs that MANOI can play — there will also be a FSR on the stick so the robot will know if it should shoot or not

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

SOFREEZINGCOLD

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008

ITS SO FREEZING COLD! I think I’m gonna transform into an ice-cube!! ZGG!

Speaking of cold… You know when you first start to skate, you pretend you’re walking? You hardly go anywhere, but you do go somewhere because of the friction… My robot can now do that! I was playing around with MANOI, gave him some roller-skates (actually: lego wheels), and programmed it in. After a few trials and errors, it works! MANOI now can look like a goofy Canadian newbie skater. SWEET!

I’m trying to find a small hockey stick that I can tape to its hands, but I have a feeling Ill have to make one myself. Carving it will be okay, I’m just worried about how I would make it thin- like half an inch. I’ll probably use one of the sanding power tools to do that (since I don’t want to saw my hand off (or fingers (but then again, they may just fall off because I’m SOFREEZINGCOLD (wow this is a lot of nested brackets (LOL))))).

I hope to play hockey with my ‘bot on Saturday… this will be interesting!

I updated my blarg to Wordpress 2.7 B2, and stylized a new theme! I’m not sure what I should name that lonely RSS elephant over on the right though. Syndie, the syndication elephant? LOL!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Yay!! Tonight I worked on my new/old robot… It’s the robot with the chassis of the Stanley robot that I started making at Stanford in the summer. It has a gerabox to power two motors for front wheel drive, plus there’s a servo to “steer” the gearbox.

The cool part is that I use a Wii nunchuck to control the robot Tonight I coded in which way is which- tilted to the left/front/back/right. The tilt to the back doesn’t work very often, so I have to fix it
By this point, you’re probably wondering where the pictures are I can’t upload photos with this version of wordpress (and I’m too sleepy to ftp them right now), but I’ll add them in tomorrow as I’m changing my blog to Wordpress 2.7 tomorrow, with a new theme I really really really like the new theme. It’s going to be awesome!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Particles in Processing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008

I finally finished off the “Define Dancing” Processing artwork that I started a long time ago! The reason why I didn’t finish it back then was because the colours were messed up. I figured them out, and while playing with the colours, I created another program called Particle Finger Painting
Here’s the Define Dancing one…

You can move your mouse around, and one particles will stay with it. All of the other particles are attracted to it, but some are stronger than the others. Plus, there’s forces between all of the particles too - some of them are negative, which results in “fireworks”-like collisions
Here’s the Particle Finger Painting one-

I really like this one… it’s the same as the Define Dancing one, but the layering and transperency of the ellipses are different.

They both use the traer physics library for the particles.
Try the live ones out- they’re probably laggy since it’s in a browser. In that case, you should download Processing and try them out. It’s a good IDE to have anyway!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Programming, Projects.

LED Star Pumpkin

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, October 31st, 2008

I did make something for Hallowe’en… it isn’t much, but it’s just LEDs in a pumpkin in the shape of the star. The most time consuming part was cutting the wires and soldering them… plus, I had to solder a 1K Ohm resistor to each of the positive leads too. Then, I had to shrink wrap it so it wouldn’t short out (like some of the LEDs on BubbleBoy short out because I didn’t shrink wrap them).

It was okay- I wasn’t too pleased with the end result because I didn’t place the points on the star right… and I wanted to carve it out.

I knew from the start though that I want to re-use these LEDs, so I have them all connected into a small black box. Inside of the box is an Arduino - a RBBB. On the outside of the box held together by tape is the 9V battery and a latching switch.

The program basically cycles the LEDs like a marquee in HTML, then blinks them “seizingly” fast (LOL).

I think I may put the LEDs up in my window… it might look cool!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Shuffling Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008

Instead of having my humanoid completely lift its foot off the ground, it “shuffles”. At least one part of the foot remains in contact with the ground. (It does work when there is no ground underneath the foot, though)

I finished the right leg on Tuesday… I worked on the left one today, and will hopefully finish it off tomorrow so I can spend some time on it on Saturday (and make an insightful blog post for once)

What I’m interested in seeing is what is the maximum speed the robot can go at, without tipping over. Since I’m coding it in slow-motion, I may not account for all of the possible moving parts when the robot is going faster.

Robot motion is pretty cool stuff- it looks easy, but it really isn’t

I’ve also been working on a few other things… More on that (hopefully) tomorrow or Hallowe’en.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Humanoid Walk

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, October 25th, 2008

This entire week I have been working on MANOI! (and iPhone apps)
I discarded the idea of having a separate TX line- as the SoftwareSerial stuff never worked properly.
Right now I’m in the process of mapping out a way for the humanoid to walk. It’s intensely difficult… So, I’m doing it with pencil and paper… then I’ll code it into the Arduino, and find a protractor to double check all the angles.

(Hey- my plan sounds FANTASTIC in theory! I guess this will mean I will end up doing everything BUT the plan )

I’ll probably make a back-dated blog post on Wednesday as that is when I got the robot to balanced, and it’s a pretty significant milestone
My “jello world” iPhone app is coming along nicely. I like it a lot, hopefully I’ll be putting it up in the App Store in the middle of next week

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Prizes? For me? Wow!!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, October 20th, 2008

Apparently I won a prize for placing 10th in the DVICE MAKE Cylon competition!! I got a MAKE the FIRST YEAR (autographed) boxed set of 4 zines, and a 1 year sub to SciFi mag! :D!!

The SciFi mag has Chuck in it… coool!!

That made my day! Definitely worth paying the $30 for shipping. At least I got a prize!! (Remember: I wasn’t even eligible to enter this competition) =P!

~~~

So yeah… my robot (MANOI, with the Arduino-SSC-32 to Processing program) WAS working, now it isn’t. I’m not entirely sure what I changed :X! Debugging again and again…

Posted in: News, Other News, Projects, Robot.

It’s WORKING!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, October 18th, 2008

My testing version of my program for Processing and Arduino to control the SSC-32 is WORKING!
I’ll post a video of it later, once I hook up some buttons, and “clean” up the code.

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.