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!

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!

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

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.

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!

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.

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…

- It now uses the Access Token that you can get from the Twitter App’s panel
- No more inserting PIN info into a file
- No Arduino clutter in the sketch
- Simple methods for posting, retrieving, and searching tweets.

You can probably do a lot more things with this too, thanks to Twitter4j.

If you use this code in one of your projects, let me know! It is cool to see what people make.

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

The critical bug was that the files were being saved to the application bundle. At the time, the documentation never explicitly said that this would not work. Rather, it suggested to save in the appropriate location in the Library. It turned out that Mac App Store Apps are a little different than Mac Applications. Have you tried to delete a Mac App Store App? You won’t be able to, because of the permissions. This is essentially what was happening to us. We were trying to save to something that wasn’t able to.

It was interesting to see how fast Yelling Robot sunk. I was documenting the status of the App during the whole day, here were some of my notes:

9:30AM
Yelling Robot #14 on USA
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada

10:30AM
Yelling Robot #11 on UK
Yelling Robot #20 on USA
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada

11:00AM
Yelling Robot #21 on USA
Yelling Robot #65 on Australia
Yelling Robot #11 on UK
Yelling Robot not on top charts for Canada

12:15PM
Yelling Robot #11 on UK (rated 2 stars, 5 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #82 on Canada
Yelling Robot #26 on USA (rated 2 stars, 5 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #60 on Australia

1:00PM
Yelling Robot #14 on UK (rated 1.5 stars, 8 1 star ratings)
Yelling Robot #60 on Australia
Yelling Robot #69 on Canada
Yelling Robot #31 on USA (rated 2 stars, 6 1 star ratings)

Here are some observations from the notes:

1) Once again, Canadians never download my Apps. I thought it would be different for Mac App Store Apps, but it wasn’t. It sucks because I make them here in Canada! You would think that people would at least download it…

2) The UK still seemed to like it even though it didn’t work. Weird!

3) The one-star ratings KILL YOU.

We were able to push an update out before the weekend, so that was really good. This was nice because all of a sudden, you get to see the ratings go up and up and up! As of today (Jan. 28, 2011), we are back to a 4.5 star rating.

We went from a 1 star to 4.5 stars! Woot!

The wind for Yelling Robot has been keeping up for a very long time. With iOS Apps, we usually see it die within three days. Yelling Robot has been going strong for weeks.

I think this is because of a few reasons…

1) We were #1 in Entertainment (Free) for a while
2) It’s a FREE Mac App, not many of those around

For a while, I was wondering how on earth so many people could be downloading Yelling Robot, day after day it never seemed to tail off. “Were there really that many Mac OS 10.6 computers out there, that would want to download Yelling Robot? Wow!” It does turn out that some fireplaces are now currently ranked higher than Yelling Robot in the Free Entertainment, and our downloads are tailing off. Being on the top of the charts evidently does help.

So, the ride of Yelling Robot was pretty good. I would have enjoyed it more if we didn’t have that critical bug. I wonder what would have happened?

To answer a FAQ, “Why is Yelling Robot a 17+ Application?” … it is because to some people it may not seem clear that what you type in the text fields will actually be said, OUT LOUD. We didn’t want any mishaps on that end. There is not any 17+ material in the App itself, it is just a precautionary measure. There is actually a review that demonstrates this:

That’s why we made it 17+. Exactly for the above situation.

Now that we are over the initial hype, what updates would everyone like to see in Yelling Robot?

First off, I got an actual phone that runs the Android OS! The user experience is sort of meh, I guess it’s a personal opinion sort of thing. What they did on the Android OS was separate some functions out to the hardware. I have to admit, it’s a bit confusing to go from the mindframe of everything will be accessible via the screen to pressing actual buttons. The menu button is great, though.

Making Android Apps is done in Java (yay, my first language!) through Eclipse. It will be fun to do some of the advanced things on this platform, like Augmented Reality. I would love to Augment explosions, so you can blow stuff up with your mind (er, smartphone), without harming anything. Imagine how much more peaceful the world would be with such an App?!

Next, KiloWhatt a la iPad: Split Screen View

The split screen view is really important in iPad Apps. KiloWhatt, right now, is the only energy management App for iPad, so updating its Universality is quite important. Making split views is, of course, more tricky than it seems. There are some really bad gotchas that can get to you. The one that got me was auto-rotation, it was sneaky. (You have to have autorotation enabled for all views).

All that is left in this version is to get all the information appearing, and make some popup view controllers. I missed the deadline for the App submission before Christmas, so I think I will work on this more for a few weeks to improve everything, like adding in the easy-peasy plist sorting capabilities.

Sorting data in Cocoa is breathtaking. Imagine you have a NSArray of NSDictionary…

forrst

HOW BEAUTIFUL IS THAT?! SERIOUSLY! IT TOTALLY DESERVES CAPS LOCK!

I also want to add in some Three20, Twitter, and Game Center.

Finally, the crazy particle kaleidoscope.

Kaleidoscope Particles iOS Cocos2d from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

This is using Cocos2d for iPhone. It is amazing. This actually runs at 60fps on an iPhone 4, and rarely drops to 58fps. I was trying to use Core Animation for a lot of things, like a Crazy Stars revamped, but Cocos2d is definitely better to use. They have lots of documentation, examples, and friendly people on IRC who help you out.

What I want to do with this App is add in some Box2d, so that I can fling the particle around and it will be bouncing all over the place! It would also be really neat if I can add some satellites around each of the emitters. I really enjoy the way single pixels show up on a retina display, they are tiny and crisp, so it would be interesting to see those flowing around the emitters.

Special shout out to Ken aka Retro for sending me 20 chips that I can use as the biocore in BEAM robots! Oh, and these hilarious Robot Monkey tissues!

To finish off, here’s a nice photo I took a few weeks ago: