apps4arduino – Meters for Arduino on iOS, Introducing Wijourno!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

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!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, apps4arduino.

Learning Pet – VOTE! (Open Hardware Summit Scholarship)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

VOTE FOR LEARNING PET IN THE OPEN HARDWARE SUMMIT SCHOLARSHIP!

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!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd, Android, Android ADK, Programming, Projects, Robot.

RoboBrrd Cosmic Soap

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Creating art with robots usually ends up with a result that is unexpected from the beginning! I created this fluid dynamics + physics sketch in Processing that was fun, and sort of looked like the soap from space. I connected it with RoboBrrd, and it was super unreal the result that it created.

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

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd, Art, Programming, Projects.

RoboBrrd Food – Using the Redpark Serial Cable

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Remember a while ago, when I was able to send data through the MFi SkyWire cable? It turns out, now there is a cable designed for hobbyists, with an SDK, by Redpark! They were very kind enough to send me a cable, so I figured that the first thing to try would be to feed RoboBrrd!

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.

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot, iPhone.

Robot Mesh Network: RoboBrrd and MANOI

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

The robot mesh network finally worked last night! Whenever the PIR sensor on RoboBrrd was triggered, MANOI would do a BAJNGL (both arm jingle) move. Here’s a video, there’s even live debugging in the video because there were some loose wires on MANOI’s SSC-32 that weren’t there when I tested everything (of course) bahaha:

View the video on YouTube.

The code can be found on Github.

There are other posts on the tag robot mesh network that you can look at if you want other videos on how they work on the mesh network

Here are some randomly ordered thoughts:
- Doesn’t use XBee API mode, because I could never make it work
- Not sure why RoboBrrd’s eyes weren’t blinking :S They do blink when I power the Arduino UNO (Communication board) instead of the Arduino MEGA (Main board).
- Need to make MANOI’s communication board loop a bit more fast & optimal
- RoboBrrd’s beak looked funny because the popsicle stick bindings are all loose
- RoboBrrd’s base needs to be painted
- YodaBot needs to get its wiring redone for inter-board communication
- The bugs I encountered were:
-> An interrupt pin that was triggered whenever touching the wire. Fixed by changing the Arduino. (This one tripped me up for two days, it was extremely tricky to debug)
-> XBee couldn’t send out. FIxed by swapping the XBee.
-> NO TX/RX BUGS FOR ONCE! YAY!

I hope to link together more behaviours between MANOI and RoboBrrd! Networking the robots together is amazingly fun ^^, and it lets me do something that I’ve always wanted to do, let robots communicate with each other. It will be interesting to see what can happen when we add Yoda Bot into the mesh

You’ll be hearing more about RoboBrrd as I’m going to try to enter it into the MAKE Bots with Character contest! Yay!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Logomotionator

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Logomotionator is an App for the FIRST Robotics Competition 2011 that I created during the build season while helping out Team 296: The Northern Knights! You can download it on iTunes for free.

Here is the description of Logomotionator:

Logomotionator provides a way for teams to organize and collect their ideas about strategy and scoring during the 2011 FIRST Robotics Competition season.

Features:
- Fabulous user interface design
- Track the scoring for the red and blue alliance
- Up to 5 tubes per peg will be counted (in case some are deflated)
- Record which teams were on the alliances, their minibot scores and penalties
- View your saved scores and email them
- Draw strategic plays on the game field in red and blue
- Easily access the usfirst.org website

The FIRST Robotics Competition is a fantastic way to get youth interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Check out one of the regional competitions in your area to see what the future holds.

Inspiration for the App came about by the temptation of an Apple eMate 300 (an iPad of 10 years ago, basically)! I took in some feature requests and just started to work away at it. Making the calculator algorithm was fun

All of the coding was straight forward. I must be getting really good at making Apps or something. Making the game field drawing stuff was probably the part I most enjoyed:

I also really enjoyed the email stuff too:

The only rough spot was on the saved scores view, because the “Remove button” is actually in a different section, I have to replace it with an invisible cell when removing everything because of the protective UITableView cell math.

Once all of the functionality was there I wanted to make something that would really capture the energy that the competitions have. I figured it would have to look snazzy, so I paid close attention to detail when styling the App. On the iPhone 4′s retina display, the graphics look beautiful.

This is what the background looks like, I had a lot of fun making it!

This is my most complete App ever (so far). I really like the finished product. I can’t wait until after the season is over to go through some of the code with the programming students. It would be a fun exercise to break down the calculator algorithm!

I hope you enjoy it. There’s some more screenshots on flickr. Go download Logomotionator now! It’s free!

FIRST®, FIRST® Robotics Competition, FRC®, FIRST® Tech Challenge, and FTC®, are registered trademarks of FIRST® (www.usfirst.org) which is not overseeing, involved with, or responsible for this activity, product, or service.

Posted in: Art, FIRST, Programming, Projects, iPhone.

YellowAPI and Confoo HackFest

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, March 12th, 2011

On Tuesday I participated in my first HackFest ever! It was at the Confoo conference, which was about web technologies. The purpose of the HackFest was to just make anything that uses the YellowAPI. Prizes were two AppleTVs and one iPad 2!

YellowAPI is a great API. It works well, and you can specify a good amount of parameters for the return data.

For the HackFest, I ended up making a Mac App that used speech synthesis to speak the results of the “What?” and “Where?” questions out loud. It also had an avatar attached to it that visualized each synthesized phoneme. Basically it was a mashup of Yelling Robot meets YellowAPI.

The competition looked pretty fierce for the second half of the day, so I submitted my demo at the first half. I won an Apple TV! There were extremely useful applications of the YellowAPI at the HackFest. It was fantastic!

Here is a video of the App I made, YellowYELLR in action. The volume in this video is a little weird since it’s night time, sorry in advance.

I created a sample Xcode project using YellowAPI for everyone to look at, it’s on Github.

Hopefully more people will start to use YellowAPI in their projects! I know I will be…

Posted in: Programming, Projects.