RBBBs and Pololu SSCs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

I received the two RBBB’s, 1 FTDI TTL USB cable, and two Pololu Serial Servo Controllers (SSC) I bought a few weeks ago. Since then… I’ve been tinkering with them quite a bunch. I learned an incredible amount too from just a tiny board!

Building up the RBBB wasn’t too hard. At first, I printed off the wrong ‘instructions’ - which mind boggled me a bit until I noticed that they were indeed wrong. Once I had the right instructions printed… it was more simple. I was worried about the polarity of the bigger capacitors. After I had it all finished… I went and looked up the FTDI-USB cable specs. This cable is pretty interesting if you think about it, 1 wire turns into 6 more colourful wires -Gnd, CTS (clear to send), +5V, TX, RX, RTS (request to send). I downloaded the Blink program without any problems… until I wanted to test it. The LED wasn’t blinking! After about 5 minutes of intense thought, I realized that there was no LED on pin 13. That was a stupid mistake!

Another stupid mistake, but this one is funnier, was when I was trying to test the other RBBB.
… I forgot to put the chip into the IC socket. That really made me ‘lol’ for 10 minutes.

Then, I was trying to fit it into the breadboard… lets just say it took a longer than normal time.

When the Pololu SSCs showed up, I was pretty excited! Then when I saw them… they are REALLY tiny! It was a big challenge to solder these without them flying out of my hand. I don’t have a 3rd hand tool to hold it steady, so I would sometimes have to hold the ‘pinchy-things’ with my elbow and hold the solder and soldering iron with my hands. The headers were extremely difficult too…

Getting the Pololu to work with the Arduino is pretty aggrivating. I think I’m almost there, I just have to switch the input to the logic level side as I was using the RS-232 one. I thought that the Arduino used RS-232 on its TX line, but it doesn’t. It uses a non-inverted logic level (er well, that’s at least what I read). Tomorrow I plan on looking up the difference between the two
Here are some pictures… I finally threw the desoldering pump out the window (joking) and bought solder wick. Also finally bought NON-LEAD SOLDER!

Other than playing with these, I’ve been flow-charting A LOT of AI programs, and learning more first-order predicate logic. I really like logic and the probabilities and Bayes and everything!!!!! Also having fun thinking about random and bell curves… More back-dated Stanford blog posts to come (so many photos hahah)!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Current Robot Projects

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, July 20th, 2008

Yay! I have access to the internet
After being at Stanford, I really realized that I extremely like AI and robotics. So, I have many robot projects going on all at one time. Here’s a list:

• Line following, maze navigating, AI robot
  • Using an Arduino and Processing
  • Started this project at Stanford (they funded it!)
  • 2 DC motors
  • 5 LDRs
  • Chassis is a cardboard and plastic beginners robot kit (bought at the ExplOratorium while at Stanford)
  • I need a gearbox!
• BubbleBoy
  • A robot that has fake emotions determined by the pushes of buttons and the LDR
  • Using Arduino and Processing
  • 2 Servos
  • 1 LDR
  • 2 Push buttons
  • Chassis is the older BubbleBoy - Pinky one I created
  • I need another Arduino - or an RBBB!
• MANOI AT01 -> Arduino
  • Transplanting my humanoid to the Arduino board
  • I need 2 or 3 Pololu micro serial servo boards - they can be controlled via a TXRX line, making it easy for the Arduino to control many servos
  • Will write software to control the servos in Processing (easy GUI!)
• Phoenix
  • Basically, my project for the year. *cough*ISEFhopefully*cough*
  • Uses much of the knowledge I attain from all projects and the Stanford EPGY Summer Institutes AI Program
  • Hospital bedside accompaniment
  • I’m purposefully lacking details here.

Some of the parts I need immediately in order to continue building are expensive though
But hey, there’s always Styrobots in my shop ready to be purchased!!

In the meantime, I’m still annotating and pulling all the details out of these books…

• Building Sociable Robots
• Probablistic Robotics
• AI Textbook from Stanford
• AI journal book from Stanford
• The Emotion Machine
• Intro to AI

I’m also compiling a huge blog post of over 1,000 pictures from Stanford
Soon after that, I’ll post pics of these projects

Posted in: MANOI, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Stanford EPGY :D

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

HOLY MACARONI!

:D I was accepted in to Stanford EPGY AI program!! I’ll have something to do for a part of this summer! This is amazing! I’m flabberghasted :o. (<-- that word is so cool, that it can only be used on special occasions)

I received the email at 12:07 AM. (midnight)
The only problem is... money.
I have to come up with $500 before May 7th. I don’t know how I will do it yet. I’ll daydream about it tomorrow
CALIFORNIA!! PALM TREES ^_^!! SUN!! The red bridge thing :D!! WWDC 08 AFTERMATH !! APPLE STORES!! PIXAR!! INFINITE LOOP!! STANFORD!! ROBOTICS!! AI!! COMPUTERS!! WOOOOOOOOT!!

I’m SO excited! And happy!

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

LCD Kit Arrived!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, April 10th, 2008

A big huge thank you again to uC Hobby for sending me an LCD Kit! Now I can FINALLY use my LCD that I bought at a HAM radio thing.
I have a few problems with it… for instance, I don’t know what the pins on the right hand side are supposed to connect to. The 1-16 pins are pretty straightforward - but what on earth are those other ones for?!

Furthermore, I accidentally might have exploded the entire thing. I’m sleepy after school, so I reversed all the connections to 5V and Gnd. Ugh. The chip was so hot! I don’t think they’re designed to resist that amount of hotness. :( I hope I didn’t break it!

Here are some pictures

I hope I can figure it out today It’s not broken until it’s broken! I still have faith.
Thank you uC Hobby!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Bubble Boy WORX!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, April 6th, 2008

Energy is the ability to do WORX! Meaning that… Bubble Boy works.
Here is a video- (with more funky music!)

And pictures-

Hiphip Hooray!

What I had to do to get it to work was stagger the servos. Then I put lots of hot glue into the holes that were punctured into the styrofoam so everything was secure. After that, I plugged in 4 paperclips and attached them to wire which attached to separate sides of the two servo horns. YIPEE!

Oh yes- although this post was published on April 11th, the content was actually from April 5th.
Friday Night MANOI (Replaced by Bubble Boy Again) will be up sometime this weekend due to my HW schedule Keep an eye out for it

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Timeline of Events, Science Fair (Day 2)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, March 17th, 2008

It’s JUDGE DAY! Wooooooooooo!

4:45 AM - …And the wake up music is Bubbly by Colbie something… YAY! Well done iPod again - the random algorithm is really doing good
4:50 AM - Check results of Robbie Robot downloads … I broke the 1,000 mark!

4:57 AM - Looked and spy’ed to see what IP my computer is and where StatPress thinks it’s from - the flag is Canada, but it thinks it’s from Saudi Arabia! The ISP is correct, not sure how it gets SA!
5:00 AM - Watch goes off! Time to wake everyone up
5:02 AM - Time to get ready wooo wooo!

5:12 AM - Waiting for Dad
5:13 AM - Attempts to go downstairs… but hears a squeak and it’s too dark (even with my iPod as a flashlight)

5:40 AM - Time to get dressed
5:50 AM - Eat and drink (a bit — not really hungry)

6:10 AM - Put the bags in the car and got ready to leave!

6:15 AM - Left the house!

7:20 AM - Arrived at the school, yay

7:35-8:20 AM - Wrote log in the actual log book as opposed to my commonplace book

8:25 AM - Went into the gym and set up

1st judge - Remote control for Keynote presentation didn’t work However, judge didn’t understand anyway - I’m thinking that he’s anti-machine as he was absolutely repulsed at making friends with a computer or having a conversation with it. He didn’t speak English very well, either.
2nd judge - Rebooted my mac a few minutes before, but it was still was loading up when he was asking about my project. The remote worked though! But my ‘tardiness’ of the presentation probably lost me 10 marks, at least! In the end, he didn’t understand it.

3rd judge - A programmer! Awesome! He really liked the source code of Robbie, and how it was made on a mac. This particular judge knows C, Java and does some PHP on the side.

4th judge - I actually can’t remember this one for some reason. All I remember is that he wanted me to sit down with him, which was pretty neat! It was either this judge, or the next one, that asked me about Turing (who he was, why the test is so special, etc. etc.). He liked Robbie!

5th judge - This judge was astonished that I used Keynote. I was actually taken aback when he blurted out ‘Hey! That’s Keynote!’ I had to pull myself to get back to the conversation about conversations, instead of having a conversation about how much fun Keynote is. He really liked Robbie. At the end of it all, we were checking out iMovie to see if I could remotely fix his .AVI problem. It turns out that there’s some new encoder of .AVI’s, or something. Neat!

12:00 PM - Took a peak at some of the awards in the booklet. Only 2 people can go to ISEF. That’s pretty tricky! I really hope they choose a computer science project. Personally, I REALLY want to go as I want to be CHALLENGED! I’m eager for a challenge, difficult questions, and some computer scientists to nag me about my almost-OO code! McGill has 4*250 EE & CE prizes. They also have 2*100 CS Robotics awards. Concordia has a paloozle of awards, for instance 2*250 outstanding achievement in CS, 2*250 outstanding achievement in EE & CE, 2*250 women in engineering & CS, 2*250 faculty of engineering & CS award. Wow, so much CS from Concordia! I’m really amazed at how there is so many biology awards, it’s quite crazy. There is also the Ecole Polytech award (that I won last year). It will be nice if I win something, but I’m really not expecting anything. If I do win something, it will go towards books from amazon.com! I’d love to read more stuff!

12:30 PM (After lunch)

Profound Passerby-er #1 - This person knows Pascal AND Assembly! I was completely astonished. Assembly is like… the toughest language out there! It actually turns out that he used his Pascal program and debugger to create an Assembly code. That’s extremely neat! We talked about Java and Objecive-C, and of course Robbie. Pretty neat!

Profound Passerby-er #2 - This person is definitely the person you want to talk to your project about! Unfortunately, I was wandering around looking at other projects when he dropped by, so my Dad helped get him. I’m glad someone FINALLY asked me challenging questions! Although, they weren’t that challenging, but I actually had to think for a few milliseconds before answering some of them. (COOL!) He asked for my bibliography, which is not that impressive as I didn’t have many resources available 0_0. (The two things on there are MIT OCW, and Computer Speech Technology by Robert D. Rodman). He also asked if I could have Robbie tested with autistic children — ABSOLUTELY! I’d love to do that!

4:00 PM - Erin doesn’t understand why everyone is leaving

4:05 PM - Realizes it’s time to go home, so packed up the display and everything! I didn’t leave my logbook or report there, however. I’m extremely skeptical since last year.

6:00 PM - Home sweet home!

So, now my plan is to see if I can get my Arduino running in Xcode! Once I do, I’ll be able to port the speaking character view of robbie to it, so that say, a stuffed penguin, will be able to move its beak up and down to signify that it is speaking.

I have to get this running ASAP, if I want to live up to what I said to Profound Passerby-er #2!

Apparently, tomorrow I have to wake up at the same time. Oh well! Doesn’t matter to me, as there is no formal judging. Just the fun stuff, no stress! If a profound person asks about your project, you can just take it easy - and not worry about outlining the dry and boring Purpose, Discussion, Conclusion. On with the demos and flowcharts!

One more thing - Robbie broke 1,000 downloads this morning!

Happy St. Patty’s Day! Enjoy these pics!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Woohoo! Robbie added to Apple downloads!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, March 13th, 2008

As Robbie would say… ‘Wowee’!

I’m so happy that Robbie made it in to the Apple downloads!

You can check it out here

MacUpdate also put it on its site!

That’s pretty awesome!

However, I still need people to complete the survey! So please, spread the word, and do the survey!

Thanks!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Robbie is UP and RUNNING!

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

Robbie is now available for download! The current release is #21.

Check out Robbie’s work-in-progress page here!

And, I would extremely appreciate it if, after playing with Robbie, you can complete the survey here.

It’s now 1:35 AM when I’m posting this, so I’ll be fixing up the Robbie page and survey in the morning.

Have fun with Robbie!

A video will be up on youtube tomorrow evening, I hope!
UPDATE: 1:08pm - it’s all good now! I’ll be adding more pics and decorations to it throughout the next few days. If you can, please fill out the survey after you chatted with Robbie!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Robbie is Better than Ever!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Woooohoooooo!

So, the whole purpose of the 20-inch display being lent to me was to display a bigger Robbie. Check out the pics, he looks AWESOME! I just want to poke his chubby-wubby cheeks ^___^. Frankenteddy: Erin, Robbie doesn’t have chubby cheeks. Erin: Shhhh! x]]

I ran into some roadblocks today *coughtyposcough*, but thanks to scott he helped point them out to me! (THANKS!!!)

It all seems reasonably accomplishable now! I have to add in more levels to the conversation though, but I’ll probably put the app up for download tomorrow morning, after I make the survey form.

7 sleeps till science fair!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

iFund

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

John Doerr a Partner to Kleiner Perkins Claufield & Byers announced on March 8th something, most likely, life-changing. 

$100,000,000. For investment.

This can be applicable for any number of start-ups, companies, pre-launch, or what have you. The investments can range from $100K of seed capital to $15M of expansion capital in mobile application and service companies.  

That’s a lot of money, and an even bigger opportunity.   

I’m determined to invent better speech conversation technology. The possibilities of Robbie the Robot are limitless in my mind’s eye. Imagine being able to have your Apple TV, mac mini, or whichever mac server farm in your household, organizing all of the variables. How many eggs one has, what the temperature inside is, or the temperature of the pool. All it would take is asking Robbie, hands free, so you aren’t distracted while driving. I’m not 100% sure if iPhone does or does not have the ability to phone people based on speech, but I have an idea on how to do it. Thousands are killed in cellphone related crashes, hands free is the way to go.  

I’m going to apply, and see what happens. If this investment is bestowed upon me, my life would be changed forever, definitely for the good! If it isn’t bestowed upon me, I’m still going to work on Robbie! Nothing is going to stop me from modifying Robbie into life changing applications. For instance, teaching different languages, making children more focused and relaxed, aiding the elderly as a therapeutic device, helping some autistic children or teaching someone to READ. With all of the possible modifications of Robbie, it is bound to be a thrill. With that in mind, I wanted to end with a little quote during the keynote which I thought was really great.  

Entrepreneurs do more than anyone thinks possible, with less than anyone thinks possible. Entrepreneurs are the risk takers, they’re the revolutionaries, they’re the rebels.  

 

Good luck to everyone that enters!

Posted in: News, Programming, Projects, Tech News.