At Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, meet RoboBrrd! RoboBrrd is a lil robotic animatronic character who’s many capabilities extend its cute character.

It’s perfect for students to get started in learning robotics, and making their own robot from scratch! Here is the Instructable for building a popsicle stick version, and a RoboBrrd kit version is coming soon.

Here are three magical things about RoboBrrd:

• Different hats change its behaviours!
• It can communicate to other robots via a mesh network!
• It eats virtual fruit from an iPad!

But of course, it’s not really magic! You can make it yourself! Want to learn how it was done? Ask me at Maker Faire!

WIN AN EXCLUSIVE ROBOBRRD!

Take a picture of you and RoboBrrd at our table and tweet it to @RobotGrrl with the #makerfaire hashtag, and be entered to WIN an exclusive prototype of RoboBrrd kit version when it is ready!

Hope to see you at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012!

This picture isn’t the exact beak version, but it illustrates the point here.

Out of nowhere I wake up with this idea that it would be really cool to have the wing servos and beak servo supported by being suspended between the top and bottom faces. It took a while to get this idea working, and the pieces for this stage are extremely dependent on each other. However, using this idea saves an incredible unbelievable amount of space.

One of the great things about being here is to rapidly prototype everything. It helped get the beak centered and sorted out very quickly compared to if I were to just try to do it by CAD. Here is a stack of cardboard brrds that are swamping Impy RoboBrrd!

It takes a while to understand the best settings to choose for laser cutting a material that does not have a template for it. For cardboard I usually had to do multiple passes. Each time I tweak the parameters and am getting pretty close to having great cuts on the first try.

There has been a lot of thought that has gone into what material should be used. At first I started out using basswood, but to get it in 6 inches rather than 4 is quite more expensive, and not a lot of people have it around. In the end we’re going to be using some mdf. It’s not very expensive, and it is really sturdy!

For fun, here was some test cuts done on extruded polystyrene. This stuff laser cuts really easily, but you can’t depend on it for kerf testing.

Here is another pic of the initial cardboard lasercut testing. On the corners are some supports that will help in the stability of RoboBrrd to prevent it from collapsing :p

CAD has been so helpful lately. It sucks that I have to use it on this tiny screen, but the number of mistakes that you can catch before cutting is quite amazing. Creating assemblys of all the parts and seeing the piece right before your eyes is amazing!

One of the highlights of being here is that in addition to their amazing laser cutter, they have a shopbot cnc! It is really noisy when it is actually cutting.

I’m also working on some stamps of the Robot Party and RoboBrrd for Hackerspace passports.

The process for laser cutting stamps is interesting. A lot of the features are already built in to the driver software. One of the main differences though is that it is a raster cut rather than vector cut.

Going to the local electronics stores is really cool. You never know what you will find, like this really nice robot hidden away:

In case you missed it, there are two guest blog posts that I’ve done on the Evil Mad Scientist blog! The first one is how to blink an LED with an AVR! Go read it!

The second one is Part 1 of a Heathkit build. It is so cool. Also weird timing because the day I posted it, they also decided to shut down again. They must have seen the blog post and were terrified XD. The build is a lot of fun, so go read about it!

That is about all the progress for now. I’ve done some cool things with code that I can’t really mention here just yet since it is still secret. The past few days I’ve been working on making it parametric so that many more things will be easier. Only problem is that sometimes making things parametric is really trying.

Been learning lots all about electronics and trying to soak it all in like a sponge. Only problem is that with my memory, I hardly soak anything in. But at least the really interesting parts seem to stick pretty well

Another thing that has to be done is that this bird has to be hacked somehow! Since it is so adorable I was thinking of some non-invasive hackery, like adding LED bling or an animatronic exoskelton to it.

There is so much more to be accomplished before Maker Faire Educational Day. It’s going to be insane. I hope I’ll be able to do it all! If RoboBrrd kit version doesn’t get done now, it will probably never get done because there just aren’t that many resources like everything at EMSL up in Canada. This is the sprint before the finish line!

Our tour was from @drwave, who I met on Twitter from WWDC’11! EMSL also came along, and it turns out that they also knew him from before. Thanks for the tour drwave!

Pixar is a pretty cool place, at the front there is a huge scale version of the Luxo Jr. lamp and its ball! Check it out!

The inside is super spacious. They probably could fit a spaceship in the atrium area!

Here is RoboBrrd on top of Mike. This would make a great caption contest pic

ROBOBRRD COMES IN PEACE.

This is a very cute picture of Wall-E. Also got a little insight into Wall-E’s arms! For instance, have you noticed how expressive they allow Wall-E to be? It can push them back to look more powerful, but also bring them closer in to make it look more vulnerable.

It’s really cool how many awards Pixar has. Their creativity has brought them to such great heights! These next pics are all from EMSL- thanks guys!

RoboBrrd enjoys trying to communicate with Kevin!

RoboBrrd in an epic staring contest with a bird from For the Birds!

Pixar is a great example of how magical technology combining with art can be. There is tons of computer science that goes on behind the scenes of all the animation, but without the characters and stories it wouldn’t really mean much. It takes them a really long time to render one frame though- about 8 hours.

I wonder how well animatronics could compare in this way. All of the robots would have to be built by hand, but then you can direct them (or they could direct themselves autonomously) and just film the result. You would probably need some computer graphics to enhance explosions and such though. As for faeries now, they aren’t that difficult as you could simply use a UAV.

For large characters this approach might not work well, but for mini swarm characters it would be great. Another cool thing about animatronics would be that the characters would get to roll/walk down the red carpet themselves! With some natural language processing, perhaps they could answer the interview questions as well. Or respond in bleep bloops!

One of the main questions that I’ve had is how to make a squash and stretch robot. For example, Keepon is a squash and stretch robot. These type of robots are always interesting because their degrees of expression are immense. This technique is used often in Pixar films, and it is just fantastic to add more expression to the characters.

Originally I was thinking in terms of using multiple swashplates to get the movement correct. However, it would be a lot better to use a robot that has some sort of volume, like if it is filled with a fluid or something. This answer is a great help! Though in my robots I’ll probably use bean bag beans rather than a liquid, it is a step in the right direction. Really looking forward to trying to make a squwetchy robot!

Thanks @drwave for giving us a tour! You rock! It was fantastic to go to Pixar!

Open up terminal and do this (you’ll need Macports installed). The search should return results to proceed further. The two things we will be installing are a theme, and the theme picker.

The themes are stored at this place, so do this command…

And you can move in your various themes to here…

And now for the best part! To actually choose the theme! Let’s open up chtheme! Use this command:

Now hopefully you will have some themes that you can switch to there. If not, I’m not sure what has happened. This has been happening to me quite often, but there are some occasions where I get it to work and it’s pretty cool.

If you ever want to reset everything…

If you are looking for some cool themes, there are a handful of most excellent ones on deviantART that you can search around for. Hopefully it works out good for you, have fun with your new X11 look!

The Robot Party is tomorrow, Thursday at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This week might be a little different than other weeks thanks to Google+ Hangouts on Air being available to everyone! This is such a super step forward, and will hopefully help greatly with bandwidth issues.

We will be broadcasting LIVE from Evil Mad Science! We may also be giving away a goodie or two, more details on that soon to come! There will be lots of robots, maybe we will put the webcam on the CNC again!

What is the Robot Party?
The Robot Party is a weekly Google+ hangout that brings together robot builders from all over to share their robots, knowledge, and ask questions! It is for all age ranges, young or old, just bring your robot!

The Robot Party is every Thursday at 8PM ET! If you have a robot, join the hangout on Google+ HERE! Be sure to leave a comment on one of the posts so we can add you to our circles for the party.

Hope to see ya at the Robot Party!

The Robot Party from last week was fantastic! It was LIVE from Evil Mad Science where we showed the LetsMakeRobots v4 drawing with prizes from seeedstudio using NilsB’s robot that Andrew relayed for us! PHEW!

There were many cool robots on this Robot Party! It’s most excellent to see everyone helping everyone! Here we are holding up some robots, the Eggbot and RoboBrrd and a Medium Tank!

You can watch the recording of the Robot Party on YouTube on this playlist!

Here is part 1 of 5!

The complete list of winners is here!
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/31820

Chaot’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeTsyiKaJoQ

RobotFreak’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxVMKiFoXto

It was great to see the robots working live! Here was another robot that stopped by- DataBus from the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Challenge!

Eaglesnest Robotics was also there! They got to show off their Meggy Jr RGBs to the Evil Mad Scientists themselves! Pretty cool!

Didn’t get a chance to donate? Good news! Adafruit Industries has added 5 more prizes! So pop over to LetsMakeRobots now and donate! More info to come on when they will be drawn, and maybe more special things will happen!

LIVE ROCKS! Special thanks to Evil Mad Science for being there LIVE and their speedy internet to broadcast the Robot Party!

See everyone again on Thursday, 8PM ET / 5PM PT!
http://robotgrrl.com/robotparty

The ROBOT PARTY is tomorrow at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This is a very special edition broadcasted LIVE from Evil Mad Science that is celebrating the fantastic website LetsMakeRobots and their recent version 4 fundraiser! If you donated to their v4 fund before May 1st, then you were entered into a drawing to win 5 fabulous prizes from seeedstudio! You can still donate to LMR anyway!

But the fun doesn’t stop there! How are we to determine who will win these prizes? With a robot of course! During the Robot Party, Chaot by NilsB will be randomly drawing the 5 lucky winners! This robot was finely crafted and is very intense in its science, so go and check it out on LMR!

There’s even more! The Robot Party will be broadcasted LIVE from Evil Mad Science! Last week we had robots on top of robots on top of robots, and this week there will be more of that! Many robots, and you can ask whatever questions about the robots that you want! Ever wanted to go on a shopbot CNC ride? You’ll be able to! Also, congrats to them for 100% more evil mad!

We hope to see you there as it is bound to be a very exciting time! There shouldn’t be as many technical difficulties as last time, as the internet is now very speedy! Since we had a special request to post the recording of the Robot Party this week, if you can’t make it you will be able to watch the recording! Bring your robots, and see YOU at the Robot Party!

On Thursday we had a Robot Party LIVE from EMSL! There were many technical difficulties, but we appreciate everyone who showed up to the Ustream and participated in the hangout afterwards! Next week will be better because there will be faster internet. Yay!

While I’m here one of the things that has to get done is making RoboBrrd as a kit form. There’s lots of questions and redesigning. Here’s some revised CAD! As you can see, much more thick than the previous versions.

The beak mechanism is going to be a little different too. It will be a hinge using the same plasticky material as on the eggbot. I tried unsuccessfully to rip this material, it’s extremely durable!

Speaking of material, this is the 6.35mm (1/4inch) basswood. Wood is significantly less expensive than acrylic, more sturdy, can assemble strong using wood glue, anyone can drill into it easily, and best of all you can paint on it

Trying to figure out the kerf was a little horrible. With this material, a friction fit isn’t entirely necessary (because you can glue it), but having a bit of friction is nice. It took me a lot of tries, it was an epic fail, but eventually figured it out in the end!

Next time I’ll do a better job at figuring out kerf values. Live and learn.

Laser cutting the pieces is pretty fun! You have to mask the basswood before cutting otherwise there will be goop near the edges, making the piece a little discoloured and sticky. The basswood smells great!

Sometimes there are issues with cutting all the way through since basswood is a natural material. Sometimes it heats up a lot and you get bright sparks. You really have to keep an eye on the laser cutter and make sure you have an action plan if things get out of hand!

Inventor is so fantastic to figure help make sure all the tabs are lined up. I found a pretty cool program on Windows that can take timelapse screenshots, so this weekend perhaps there will be enough for yet another funky timelapse video!

Skipping along to the boards now, the boards didn’t really work before- but the issue was found and solved! Turned out the reset line didn’t have the capacitor and right resistor on it. Wooops! When that fix was made, it FINALLY WORKED! Uploading code and blinking an LED!

It also works great with the Googly Eye shield

However it did not work with the LoL Shield just yet. Perhaps it might be as simple as a power issue (because the 5V header is messed up on this one because I was trying to desolder something but failed). This will be debugged later on!

Speaking of desoldering, check out this really cool soldering station they have! The soldering iron is a Metcal, it heats up via RF waves rather than a heating element. It takes only 7 seconds to heat up! Holey moley!

There is also a very nice microscope here. You can look at a breadboard so close you can see deep into the breadboard holes. It’s like your trapped inside a breadboard and you can’t escape! Here are some pictures of various things taken with my iPhone. There is a camera mount, but there needs to be a better lighting setup for the photos to be captured properly.

We have visited a lot of interesting places around. Sooo many interesting places around here! The electronic stores are REALLY STELLAR! We also went to the SawdustShop (kind of like the TechShop but for woodworking), and I saw this clever hinge on a box that was neat!

Here was another cool place to go to, the Homebrew Robotics Group meeting! It was really cool to be with other robot builders as well. There are some really great robots there, and a lot of them were very successful at RoboGames! I presented my RoboBrrd at the meeting, it was fun! (Thanks @mifulapirus for the pic!)

This here is one of the main things I’m tasked with while being in the lab. Sort of. It should be really slick when complete. It’s pretty challenging as it is some stuff that I haven’t played with before!

In addition to all this amazing brain food, I’m learning how to make real food too! A huge part of this is making bread. Bread is actually quite optimal to make, more people should make it! Most of the food turns out to be really delicious. There’s lots of lemons, since lemons grow on trees here! This here is one of the nicer things, we made sorbet in a gelato machine. It was excitingly good!

At some point this week I will make some robobrrd and robot party hackerspace passport stamps! I unfortunately didn’t bring my Wacom tablet, so I’m not sure how I’m going to get the drawings into the computer. Eek! Hopefully the drawings will be spiffy enough!

RoboBrrd is of course enjoying its time sitting on the desk and watching cool stuff happen! Chirp chirp!

That’s all for this week! (Actually it was last week- this was supposed to be posted on Sunday haha) I’ll be posting up some more interesting things in the future! Maker Faire is swiftly approaching! Thanks to Lenore and Windell for the help so far! If you have a robot be sure to come to the Robot Party this week! It is going to be really exciting!

I helped out on Thursday with setting some things up, but on Friday was when all the robots showed up and you started to meet people! It was pretty crazy, here are my robots in the pit area!

While playing with MANOI, the actual MAKER of the MANOIAT01 humanoid kit shows up! Wow! This was totally astonishing, MANOI was the robot that got me into non-lego robots, so it’s a big deal!

He was really great and replaced the gears in one of MANOI’s knee servos! Pretty soon MANOI will be able to do some one-legged balancing tricks perhaps!

This here is what the table looked like with all the robots alive!

We had tons of kids play with RoboBrrd! Some of them said they actually want to go in to robotics so that they can build their own RoboBrrd. How cool is that! Here is one of the champions of RoboGames with RoboBrrd!

One of the kids managed to get all 4 hats to balance:

I also gave a presentation about the Robot Party at the little speakers series organized by Heather Knight! It was a lot of fun. I have no idea if anyone could hear me, but there were lots of pictures to look at at least!

The robots from Robot Japan were great. Here is one of my favourites, the robot is actually wearing the maker’s own kimono!

I also met Lem from robots-dreams, who was very kind to interviewed me! You can read more about that here, or check out the video below.

One of the coolest things ever was being able to meet Jeri in real life! I’ve had some questions about NFC antennas in my brain for a bit of time, and since she works with NFC it was good to be able to ask and get a response instantly.

Super Awesome Sylvia was also there, it was great to meet her! She really likes robots, perhaps one day she will build her own complicated robot or something!

All in all the RoboGames was great. My robots didn’t really fit in because they weren’t as violent as everyone else, but maybe next year there will be more animatronic robots! Maybe there will even be an animatronics category, for the creations that are a bit more than just art, but too cute to be classified as a ‘robot’. Looking forward to it!

Here’s the interview, it’s 14 minutes long, it was really fun to do!

The interview ended up getting a lot of blog love! It was posted up on the MAKE blog, Arduino blog, and Adafruit blog.

Wow! This was pretty crazy in a good way, so thanks guys! The video is getting close to 10,000 views!

More blog posts are in the pipeline, so keep your robo-eyes peeled!