I think I have been stuck in a bubble for a long time judging by how long it has taken me to post this- more pictures from my trip to Stanford 
It is mainly the Golden Gate Bridge and Capitola Beach. The Golden Gate Bridge is pretty amazing in real… I wonder how much paint it needs per year?! As for Capitola Beach, this was one of our outings for the first Saturday. It was okay, a bit of an ugly beach though. The weather was cold… water was cold… everything was very cold! 
The ice cream was good though. Oh yeah- I wrecked my camera at Capitola Beach because of the water and the sand. It was pretty sad. But I picked up a better camera at Best Buy, for a really cheap price, so it was pretty cool! 
There are also some pictures of De Anza drive and… APPLE! 
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Continue reading ‘Sightseeing Around’
Archive
It was a pretty bad day at my research lab today (aka: my desk next to the kitchen table, the kitchen table itself, and the floor) 
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I was playing around with the Pololu uSSC’s, they were working great after I set the servo numbers!
But, I was a little troubled by two things.
1) When the program is sent to the Arduino, the Pololu uSSC gets a fatal error because of all the goobley that goes on the TX line when transferring the program to the ATmega.
2) When I pressed on the servo, the voltage drain was visible when the boards flashed on and off
For the first problem, I tried so many things with switches and crazy circuits … but it didn’t work. So I just used a jumper from the Arduino TX to another row where the SIN’s would be on the Pololu uSSCs so that I would only have to unplug one wire instead of two each time I was trying a program. That was OK.
For the next problem, I supplied 3 more volts in the form of two rechargeable AA’s. But… after looking at a breadboard for so long your eyes start to go crazy… I inverted the poles.
It wasn’t even a second later when the board became so hot that I panicked, tearing it out of the board. But, a cloud of smoke lingered in the air. At that time I knew it was toasted… even one of the batteries was smoking.
So at the end of the day, I have one extremely dead Pololu uSSC, one that doesn’t work, and one dead RBBB. I *think* the RBBB isn’t working because the ATmega isn’t working
So… yeah… pretty bad day. The lack of sun week after week after week doesn’t help either. It’s like living in a groundhog hole 
You get some sun, but once you go out, it disappears.
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)!
Stanford has an extremely beautiful campus! It’s full with wildlife- like tiny frogs, geckos and palm trees! It’s also a really giant campus - as I found out after playing The Game. (I’ll blog about The Game later). Apart from enjoying the puns on Bread-First Search (BFS) and Death-First Search (DFS) algorithms, I really enjoyed exploring the campus. Usually I took all of these pictures while going Fountain Hopping, but sometimes I just took them while walking to the class!
Fountain Hopping was an amazing activity. Basically, you find a fountain - and you jump in it! It’s so amazingly fun! One time where we went to the fountain outside of the hospital, we were kicked out. It was pretty awkward!
One of my favourite features of Stanford is the beautiful architecture. You really have to see it in real, but I hope my pictures will better illustrate it! The detail and texture is amazing.
The total GB count of all the photos I took is 9.46! But, I only chose the best and uploaded them, so with all the small versions and thumbnails, it totaled to 2.3GB.
There will be way more posts with way more photos! Here are 309 - Hope you enjoy them!! Clicking the image will open it in the lightbox (like normal), but if you click the camera, it will open the high res photos. Please don’t use any of the high res photos without my permission first 
Thanks!!
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Continue reading ‘Exploring Stanford’
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
Hi there! This post is intended to be extremely short and quick, as it’s 1:23AM in the morning!
I arrived back on Tuesday, and Stanford and the JPL was amazing. DisneyLAND was okay but I prefer EPCOT!
I don’t have internet though, since my Dad didn’t/can’t pay the bill. I hope to buy my own internet soon so I can post all of the stuff that I want to The only internet that works is through his iMac, so it’s really ethernet not wireless internet
Thanks everyone that helped send me there, it was a blast. There was a theme song for EBF - you can check out my remix for it here: http://robotgrrl.com/coke-and-veggies-remix.mp3
More details to come!!
See ya later to all of the people that read this! A big thanks to everyone that helped donate over $1000! It helped a lot. The rest of the costs were covered by a reserved education savings account thing. This is going to be amazing! And I’m going to the JPL! Feel free to email me when I’m gone! I’m not sure if I will reply, but if I do it will be from RobotGrrl :)~at~:) rocketmail.com.
I hope to come back with many project ideas and a better outlook on AI (artificial intelligence) for NLP (natural language processing), CV (computer vision), and HCI (human-computer interaction)! I’d want to explore it with Arduino, too.
In 3.5 weeks, get ready for lots of blog posts! Funnily enough, this blog post is #666.