Festive Styrobotz

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, October 6th, 2008

Custom Styrobots are really fun to make… and they cost the same price ($20). A friend wanted a yellow Styrobot, with green hair with a comb in it, two combs on the cup, and a poem. It was pretty fun to make! Despite the rotation of the pics being messed up… here are some pictures!

The poem on the back is ‘The Road not Taken’ by Robert Frost. It’s a pretty good poem Here are morrrre pictures!

Great eh! There will be 3 NEW Styrobots appearing in my store very soon They’re all Hallowe’en themed.

In my opinion, Battygoo is really cute as are the other ones! Asside from that… MANOI is aliiiive! I’m currently in the middle of making a program to set its home position.

So keep an eye out… the Styrobots will be poppin’ into the shop very soon

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

All Coding Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Woohoo! I fixed my soldering iron - it’s FANTABULOUS now! All I did was file it with an Xacto, and sanded it a bit. Now I can finally tin the tip (before I couldn’t) It’s amazing!

My two WiiChuck adapters are finished - I tried to make it work this afternoon, but for some reason the WiiChuck header file by Tom Igoe isn’t working!!! I’m confused… maybe it’s because I’m using Arduino 0012. I’ll be playing around with it more tonight.
The WaveShield is all soldered up I’m thinking about which song I should put on my SD card to test it out… hmmm

There’s so many fun things to do eeeeee all of them are now at the coding stage yay!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Fun Weekend Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 26th, 2008

This weekend is going to be pretty fun for me
I have soooo many things to play with, it’s going to be wickedly hyper awesome!

I went to the RobotShop and got my Lynxmotion SSC-32, Soldering station, and some female jumper wires, and a force sensing resistor!
The SSC-32 is awesome! I tried it out the other day, and my MANOI is ALIVE! I made it move its head
The only thing though is that I’ll have to power all the servos externally - which is okay now as I got a 12V DC transformer to plug into the breadboard
The soldering iron is horrible I was (and still am) trying to solder the Wave Shield, but the solder won’t stick to the iron So far it has taken me 3 hours (and counting) just to solder in the resistors. The iron doesn’t melt the solder, and the flux is GOOEY! It’s disgusting! I’m even trying lead solder (this stuff SUCKS) and it won’t work… going to try to sand the tip tomorrow, and see if it works better.

The old soldering iron literally exploded… so it’s in the garbage now.

I also bought a nintendo wii nunchuck (the accelerometer thing) to go with my WiiNunchuck Arduino adapters. I’ll be using it to control MANOI (and of course, many Processing programs)

I was playing around with the Fourier transform again today… and I somehow made it to morph time. It’s really freaky! I was recording sound, when my watch beeped. When I played back the sound (after the FFT alg) it was morphed… in a totally weird and unexplainable way XD kind of sped up, but also kinda moshed together…

This entire week I’ve been studying for the SAT. This pretty much involves me trying to sit in one place, focus on one thing, and not fall asleep/daydream for 4 ENTIRE HOURS! I just can’t stay focused that long… I make so many sleepy mistakes … I have absolutely no idea what to do. The real SAT is on October 4th (in 1 week) I’m not really in a panic as the test is so trivial and boring … I just can’t focus on one thing for more than 45 minutes! My brain is always in hyperdrive mode thinking about what ifs and whys… “Why exactly do they think this test evaluates your reasoning abilities” “What if they made this test interactive, like a game, on a computer?”

I’ve been asking what if and why a lot the past week… here’s some of the questions I can remember

What if time wasn’t measured in anything… but was just a continuous flow like a river
Why do we have to measure time?
Why do we always use graphs in two dimension? I don’t care about a squiggle function on a line… why can’t everything be graphed in 3 dimensions?
Why do we always round decimal points when it’s obvious it gives us inaccurate answers?
Why is the tinfoil on my lamp making high pitched noises like vibrations? Is it because of the heat… or did I just discover something I should look into further about light?
What if light had mass?
Why don’t we know what’s in/through a black hole?
What if we could make our own net of space and see how everything interacts with anything?
Why didn’t they put more corrector magnets into the LHC?
What if the computer isn’t monitoring enough information to really see what the Higgs is like?
What happens if they’re smashing the wrong particles together?
Why can’t they just model it on a computer?
Why is the LHC in a circle?
What would happen if it was in a spiral?
Why are my desks always messy?
What will happen when robots will become pets?
Why are people so judgemental about robots?
Why are robots stereotyped to be wirey and ugly?
What if the answer to better AI systems would be to create an “AI Internet” with many algs, and an API, to create a general AI?
What if cancer can be eliminated with the use of dandelions?
What if robots could code themselves and make better versions of their algorithms?
Why is random not random?
What if there were many robots in one square, and they were given random coordinates to navigate to and from? Would it be classified as swarm robots as eventually they will all converge?
What if I made a parrot robot that could read twitter feeds out loud, in a parrot voice?

So yeah… that’s pretty much the way I think all the time… I hardly can focus on one thing, ever!

Weeeee I can’t wait to get MANOI moving and waving this weekend!

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

Pondering

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008

Recently I’ve been planning a few things that I want to post on my blog, and some other sites. Check out the list!

• Probability Intro & Bayes Theorem Tutorial
• Bayes Filter Algorithm Tutorial
• Bayes Filter Algorithm Example
• BubbleBoy Tutorial

I could extrapolate this idea into a special bloggy tutorial week where I post something each day!
Also in the works is my line following robot, and some acoustic modeling stuff. I’m pretty sure my method for the acoustic modeling will work well. Basically it will analyze the time where the waveform hits a 0, minimizes and maximizes. I’ll apply some sort of filter algorithm (not sure which one(s) yet) and then compare that result with a database of results, complete with the other mins and maxs. I can’t really explain it well yet, as it’s still in my head. After that I’ll have to implement the language model, which will choose the right word from the results of the acoustic model based on the previous words uttered and the topic!

From what I’ve seen… some recognizers are trying to skip the language model step by listening for specific phonemes in the acoustic model to try to figure out what the word is. Then, the LM’s job is to just ensure that that word makes sense in the sentence.

That process is overly complicated, all you have to hear are the words that are uttered- not all the phonemes. It is true that we don’t pronounce words the same… (nu-clee-ar vs nu-cu-lar) but essentially if one has an accent, the maxs and mins should still be comparable to the word in a “perfect” sense. (This is where the various filters and algs come in)

So yeah…

Thanks to Ron for donating $200!! It’s going to go towards a serial servo controller, a soldering iron and other things I’m so humbled by their generosity
It will definitely keep me occupied while I wait to go to university in January!

Posted in: Other, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!
The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

More BubbleBoy

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 8th, 2008

Even more BubbleBoy awesomeness

And here’s the circuit diagram!

I hope I entered crabfu’s most characterful robot contest correctly. The deadline said: 09/08/08 at midnight — but it almost sounds as if it’s already closed and so now I’m so worried that I didn’t even enter and I won’t even be considered so therefore I wouldn’t stand a chance :’( I HATE TIMEZONES!!! :( Let’s just all hope that it is entered in the contest…
Update: Everything is okay. I’m entered in the contest!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

BubbleBoy Finished

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Yay! BubbleBoy is finished (version 1). Briefly, BubbleBoy was created to demonstrate emotions and their applications in robotics. BubbleBoy has a food and water level, and when averaged out, a health level. The mood is determined by the health level. There are 10 moods, each of which BubbleBoy has a little ‘action set’ with. This is to try to get more food! After the ‘action set’ is over, you can feed it or give it water. When the food/water button is pressed, it increases the food/water level by a random int in between a lower bound and upper bound. Also, when BubbleBoy finishes three ‘action sets’, it becomes more hungry and thirsty - thereby decreasing the food/water levels. So, BubbleBoy is similar to a ‘tamigotchi’. It was fun to make- BB has 2 servos, 2 DC motors, 2 buttons, 4 LEDs, 1 LDR, and 1 LCD. All of these are controlled by the Arduino board.

The source code is here! There are no comments in the code yet (they’re all in my brain at the moment, haha).

Although I said (on Wednesday) that this was going to be posted tomorrow… it’s actually early Friday. BUT, since I haven’t slept yet, it’s still Thursday to me :] I had so much trouble getting the footage from the tape recorder onto the mac! It seemed to be like technical difficulty after technical difficulty the entire time. I’ll post more details tomorrow about the schematics… to be honest I forgot if I used pull up resistors or not! So I have to check…

All the awesome pictures! The plastic was painted green, and the push buttons were created

There’s BubbleBoy!
The future versions will employ ‘expectations’. For instance, when BB is fed, it will record the LDR value. If after three action sets and the LDR value is the same… it will expect to be fed! If it’s not fed, then it will become more hungry or thirsty since it was somewhat ‘disappointed’ because it wasn’t fed.
Schematics and fancy vocabularized blurb tomorrow

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

BUBBLEBOY TOMORROW!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Tomorrow I’ll be finishing off BubbleBoy, posting the schematics, the code, pictures, and videos! Woohoo!

I might even write a fancy shmancy few paragraphs about how scientific it is.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Dormant Blogging

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, August 29th, 2008

Dormant blogging kills the robot star
BubbleBoy is doing good- and looks EXACTLY like a pink snowman with the scarf, which is what I was aiming for.
The coding is going good… it’s all really simple Check out this video of cycling the health levels. For health >= 90 there is an action, but the others there isn’t yet because I haven’t programmed it yet teeheehee.

The video is really slow… as the delay between cycles was 10 seconds At the end you’ll see BubbleBoy’s ‘behaviour’ for health >= 90.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Stuff!!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Thanks to very kind people, I had a $200 gift certificate at Adafruit and was able to buy stuff!

• Arduino
• 2 ProtoShields
• Arduino bootloader
• Multimeter
• Boarduino
• Motor Shield
• Wave Shield

All of these are going to be extremely helpful @_@ In fact, the old multimeter broke just the other day

What’s a little cool is that the Arduino now has Italy on the back! Someone who had the Arduino at Stanford also had this style, so I guess it’s kind of cool that I had one of the Arduino Dicemilas without the map The motor shield sounds a lot of fun… as does the wave shield! I’m not sure which ones I’ll put together and test first…
Either way, I now have lots of interesting stuff to keep me entertained for a while longer
Thanks Ron & Evelyn!!!
(and I hope I won’t blow any of them up)

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.