Monday, February 27th, 2012

Working on the board this week was a blast! It is really coming together, and things will start to ramp up pretty quickly. Here’s the back side of the board!

Check out the timelapse, this is probably the most action packed timelapse yet. It has good music too!

The problem with the path intersections from 2 weeks ago was solved by just drawing better. Usually I like to draw in Illustrator and mess around with it in Inkscape. Illustrator has better erasing, so I needed that for some of the drawings. Here’s the RoboBrrd drawing. I used the method ChangeSize(SelectedLines,+100,mils) in gEDA which makes it much easier and quicker to change the line width!

Here’s an example of messing around in Inkscape. Thanks for the pointers from Windell on the EMSL forums! I have no idea how I made it, but there was crosshatching and twisting involved, thanks to the eggbot Inkscape extensions. The cool part is that somehow I was able to combine and cut the two paths, wish I knew how I did this though! :p

I visited Spikenzie Labs last week and asked them some questions about the board! They suggested using a fill, so I tried it out. It gets rid of lots of unnecessary routes, which frees up some room for other things! They also described how to make some words shiny, which I have to try out

For the back of the board I was thinking it would be cool if it was sort of tartan, like a picknick of sorts. If the board is going to be red after the test boards, this would look pretty funky with white silkscreen!

The only problem is that sometimes with silkscreens that go over the solder pads, they interfere with the soldering, or the board house doesn’t like it, or nothing happens. So in general, assume the worst happens and now since there is silkscreen on the solder pads, then you can’t solder anything to it. This was pointed out to me by my Twitter friends, thanks everyone!

I printed out the boards on paper to test them out. gEDA was really great for this, export to ps, and then open it up in Preview and it gives you everything to print even with a Table of Contents.

For the printouts, Spikenzie Labs suggested to use foam underneath the paper to stop it from crinkling when you pressed in the parts. The idea worked great!

All of the parts fit through the holes without any issues.

But there was kind of a HUGE problem with the 7805. Originally I had it standing up, and if you wanted to put a shield on, well, you wouldn’t be able to.

The board is a bit longer than the current base of the Impy (orange) RoboBrrd.

There weren’t that many changes that had to be made…

So after the changes, this is what it looks like! The 7805 is laying down, and you’ll be able to attach it to the board. I moved the routes away from it incase it gets so hot and they get pulled up. Although in such a case, I think there would be more problems than just that Keep in mind this 7805 is just for the board- not for the servos. It won’t get too hot.

Now my fav part, the back of the board! There’s so much happening here. Along the digital pins there are clouds that are being pushed by the wind. The wind is moving some raindrops and swirlys onto a little fire down below. Next to that is a garden of flowers, and a sandbox of stars and swirlys. The music from RoboBrrd is traveling all around into the garden and beyond! And on the little nub is an infinity symbol and a flower and the OSHW logo. Can you guess what the infinity symbol and the flower represent?

There’s just some more cleaning up to do, and now I get to learn about gerbers. ….I didn’t really design with any DRUs, and whenever I try to run the test, X11 crashes… sooo I hope that my eyes will be good enough. Once this is all checked, I can send them off to Dorkbot to have a few printed!

Which brings me to my next point! We have a mailbox now. Mailboxes are great, because wherever in the world you happen to be, your mailbox will be at one spot AND it’s a bit more SECURE! Yesss! No more stolen whatevers! No more soggy electronics waiting in the snow!

Making the board last week has been like a marathon. It’s going to be great to see these printed out, I’m so excited! More later, peace and robots everyone!

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

Time for some Maker Faire fundraising! To make this extremely fun, I’m going to try to answer the question: “How many MAKE: Projects will it take to get to Maker Faire?”.

I’ll be putting up lots of tutorials on MAKE: Projects, and if you like them a lot, then you can donate on my Maker Faire page here. Since getting to Maker Faire Bay Area is almost impossibly expensive, I wanted something to show for my efforts anyway in case it doesn’t work out :p

The first tutorial in the series is Instant Nature: Quick & Peaceful! If you ever get annoyed at the whir of your computer fans… this one is for you. It combines Hotkeys for Arduino with the Adafruit Wave Shield (my 3rd fav shield)! You can check it out on MAKE: Projects.

Enjoy, and hope to see YOU at Maker Faire! And if you are feeling doubley generous, here are two other people who are fundraising to get to Maker Faire: Joey and Lets Make Robots.

Also Instant Nature was mentioned up in the New on MAKE: Projects post on the MAKE: blog! WOOHOO! Thanks!

Sunday, February 19th, 2012

This is a video log for the end of week 11, I really need help with this problem. Any advice would rock!
[Watch video on YouTube]

From the video description:

Trying to make a voltage regulator for RoboBrrd that is efficient and that works. Been playing around with the MC34063 for ages now but haven’t been able to make it work right with lots of servos

If you have any ideas or tips or advice or anything it would be REALLY helpful!

Thanks in advance!

Oh yeah and if you do help enough that it will work in the end, I will buy you ice cream with sprinkles IRL! ^_^ (and I’ll make a tutorial about this circuit)

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

It has been a while since the last progress update post for RoboBrrd, 3 weeks! Which in robot years, is 300 years! HOLY COW. I’ve been dealing with a lot of real-life stuff that is just craptastic, time consuming and stressful. Seriously, all I’ve been doing the past week and a bit is sifting through piles of crap and there’s hardly any time to do anything else. The world definitely would be a better place with more robots.

Yesterday I finally had the chance to sit down and work for several hours straight on the board, and I made lots of good progress. Here is a screenie of what the board looks like right now. (actually there are some modifications where the Vin pin goes to the 7805 now)

The cool ‘RoboBrrd!’ part is actually an eps that was converted to pcb! Thanks to EMSL for describing how they did it. There’s a tool called pstoedit, and it can convert pretty much anything to anything. Sweeet! I’m going to add in a drawing of RoboBrrd on the back, as well as some random swirls and stars.

The silkscreen text for the board is annoying to make because you have to rotate every single text item. Also for the screw terminals I didn’t want the board to be sticking out very much just to say ‘GND’, so I experimented for a bit then decided to just make them all along the side. Hopefully it will be easy enough to read, it will be interesting to see how it looks printed out.

Figuring out the drill holes was tricky. This was one of the ideas… didn’t actually go with it though.

It’s a bit of extra effort, but I like the idea of having curvy lines as the routes. Maybe it’s a waste of time, but I think it will look more funky in the end.

Here’s a random screenie from a while ago. Still not sure if I’ll be going with a 2D or 3D program to create the models to be laser cut. Leaning towards 3d because it will be easier to catch some errors

And while we’re at it, a screenshot timelapse from a while ago:

The Robot Party is tonight! If you have a robot, join the hangout or watch the stream! It’s always tons of fun and everyone always learns lots.

Fun gEDA tip: Ever want to change the layer of an element? Select it, and choose what layer you want it on, then press Shift+M! w00t!

I wish there was enough time to do everything that I wanted to, but right now digging through the crap is my #1 priority. Then I’m usually so tired afterwards to not want to go out and about, so I just work on RoboBrrd. I feel really bad for suddenly not being able to mentor FIRST, but no energy + no time doesn’t make for an enjoyable time. I’m sure things will pick up soon, or I will sink into more crap. :/

The goal is to finish up the PCB and test it on cardboard. I can probably buy a kit from Spikenzie labs that will have all the Arduino parts in it to see if the cardboard prototype will work!

Tuesday, February 7th, 2012

RoboBrrd & I were at the Startup Weekend Montreal, it was an interesting experience! Considering the price of the ticket was free (won it from MGG->VCTV), I think it was quite a good value. I didn’t have any real goals in mind going in, I just wanted to see what it was all about and hopefully learn some stuff.

The first day (Friday) was when we all gave rapid pitches. The one I gave was about how cool robots are and what I want to make. It ended up making it through to the next round, and there were 3 other people who were interested in working together for the weekend!

The Edubotics team was…
@marekweb as web dev
@jonotron as web dev
@aly_eska as business
and myself as leader & robot builder

Saturday was pretty cool. We figured out what we wanted to make and how it would work. What we wanted was a math game where depending on how the screen was oriented, then it would be a different operation. The answers would trigger a response from the RoboBrrd.

Marek suggested that the app on the iPad could just be a web app, and communication from the web to the robot could be done through callbacks.

This is *really* cool because that means that ALL devices can have the same app, and they will be able to communicate with the robot.

With robotics and software on devices, you will always need a native app in order for the communication to work. But, if you have the actual playable content as a web app, then that means you can easily roll out new updates and features.

I’ll make an indepth post about this coming up soon. In the meantime, here is the code! Marek made the math game, and Jon made the memory game!
- Math game
- Memory game
- iOS App

Alyeska worked really hard on the business side of things. I learnt a bit about this, which is kind of good! She created a survey to learn what the important parts to the robot would be. One of the running jokes was how important a biology game would be. The people responding to the survey didn’t think it was that important XD

The pricing of the robot was hard to figure out, but it came out to $96 in materials, and $179 after the fact. The apps would be free.

We demoed the robots on Sunday so that everyone could try them!

On Sunday it was the final pitch day, our pitch was pretty good. We had a real demo that was actually working! I had my pockets stuffed with tools that I might need just incase something bad happened, like a 11.1V and 9V battery… I guess you could say there was a lot of potential there!

The demo was of the math game and the blue RoboBrrd. It worked! A ROBOT DEMO WORKED IN FRONT OF A BUNCH OF HUMANS! YESSSSSSS! This was really spectacular in my books

We didn’t end up winning anything, but we did get a lot of media throughout the weekend which was great. VCTV interviewed me a lot of times, that was pretty nice! Our website even got a hit from South Africa, how cool is that!

Afterwards one of the judges said to me that the robot would have to be less than $50. I said back to him that if it was that, it would be some cheap toy made by Hasbro. He said something like “yeah but it would make more money!”
I said back to him that I’m not here for the money, I’m here to make robots. A $50 toy would not do this robot justice. It’s designed to be a kit that you put together.
…Eventually it ended with me telling him that I’m the one with the robots, and he isn’t, and that this *will* work out in the end.

(I don’t really know if anything will work out in the end, but at least it is open source hardware & software)

So that little discussion was interesting. I actually don’t know the name of the person anyway. (By the way, if you’re reading this, it was nice to talk with you and I don’t mean any disrespect at all- it is just two different perspectives that don’t match up ^_^)

I plan to keep doing this thing that I have been doing which is actually called ‘bootstrapping‘. I don’t really wear boots though and don’t have straps on my shoes. That would be kind of strange. Although it’s not really ‘bootstrapping’ since I have had a lot of help from friends (thanks!) that is getting things rolling. So maybe something more like shoe-laces-auto-tied-now-go-run-’ing.

All in all, it was a pretty good weekend! It was great to work with like-minded people on the team. Most of us will see each other again at the robotics hackathon!

Sometimes during the interviews I forget who/what/when to namedrop. So here is all the namedroppingness that needs to happen here all in one place! Sorry in advance if I didn’t namedrop in a video or interview. I am really thankful for ALL the help that peeps have given, sooooo if I didn’t namedrop you, next time we see each other: ICE CREAM IS ON ME (and the sprinkles)!
- Adafruit Industries: for the servos and electronics!
- Redpark: for the redpark serial cable!
- WyoLum: for the WyoLum Open Hardware Innovation grant!
- Chris the Carpenter, Eaglesnest Robotics, Lenore/EMSL: for the most amazingest experience on the Robot Party that always makes a good story to capture the Robot Party hangout spirit, LOVE IT!

And special thanks to EVERYONE who has been supporting the robots. WOO!

Ok, and special shout out to the FIRST team that I mentor for not getting too angry at me for skipping an important robot weekend!

More blog posts to come up later!

chirp

Friday, February 3rd, 2012

Wow, what a week and a bit it has been. What has happened since the last update? MY MIND HAS EXPANDED BY A HUGE AMOUNT! …and this new knowledge has made me learn about so many new things, which is really cool.

The stuff that I learnt is kind of in the air, so here’s a basic list.

- EMSL posted a tutorial on power dissipation! Pretty cool, especially since this is what I was wondering about for the voltage reg for RB’s servos [link]

- Tried to calculate type of zener diode and resistors would be necessary for brining the voltage down from 11.1V (or 7.4V) closer to 5V. [link] [link] [link]

- Ended up spending an extreme amount of time on this and not getting an answer that made sense. Either there was no zener diode in existence for what I wanted, or the resistor values would be unfeasibly small :l

- There are some great videos here [link]

- Scrapped the zener diode idea and going to go with a SMPS. Have to lay it out on a breadboard first. There was one time when I got it to work, and it was really cool- hardly any heat. But then for some reason it stopped working! Arrrg!

- Watched this EEVBlog video about the same SMPS. It gets a little frustrating when he keeps saying it’s so simple/easy/trivial to make it when I can’t get mine to WORK! [link]

- Tonight I learned from Chuckcrunch about a LM2596, which is also a SMPS. It is rated for 3A, and seems to be promising. It’s worth a shot to try it out since we’re not getting anywhere with the MC34063. [link]

Special thanks to Dago and Wilton for answering all of my questions previously. It helped a lot. I will come back with a more detailed post later with some changes to the board.

I visited Spikenzie Labs on Tuesday (and didn’t get a ticket on the train)! It was so cool, when I visited there the big Arduino box had arrived, and they let me open it! Sweeeet!

Here are some things that we discussed:

- Use a wall plug to go in to the main servo DC jack. With a jumper, you could select if you want to power off of battery (with the plug-in voltage regulator using headers) or not. This would be more safe for schools too.

- For laser cutting it is sometimes better to just design in Illustrator right away rather than import from Inventor. Sometimes there are points that appear from the transition from Inventor to Illustrator that make the laser move slower than it should (because it is jumping to points), and sometimes it just doesn’t work because there are too many points.

- Use the audio jack to get audio in as well, and have the RoboBrrd dance to the music.

I like the audio idea a lot, I never thought of that! It will be interesting to research how exactly to do that!

It’s pretty tiring to be working on RoboBrrd but not have any material progress. I’m really hoping that this LM2596 will be able to work out so that I can get some things done. @_@

More goals/stuff todo:
- Figure out the voltage regulator situation once and for all
- Place drill holes on RB board
- Update RB board with changes discussed above
- Check board

Definitely have to note here that learning more and more about this electrical stuff is quite difficult since I’m more used to software. Not entirely sure yet if it is because of the method of thinking about problems that is making this so difficult, or the fact that the content is much more difficult than software.

At least I’m learning stuff, but the pace is incredibly slow which is extremely frustrating since this was supposed to be done ages ago. GRRR! GET THINGS DONE!

Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

Developed another ‘for Arduino’ Mac App! This one lets you use custom global hotkeys to control your Arduino. Let me tell ya, it is SUPER useful! You can learn more about Hotkeys for Arduino here!

As I was making it, I realized how easy it is to just be able to control actions on your Arduino. So I had RoboBrrd reacting to different shortcuts, so it could easily open/close its beak and flap its wings.

Since this app is more ‘action based’ rather than ‘pin based’, I find it more open ended to be used in different projects!

Here’s a quick video of the app:

I really really really enjoyed making this app. It made me realize how cool Matatino is. Really, I spent 4 hours on getting the hotkeys working, then I drop in Matatino and POOF it works! How cool is that?!

It’s on sale right now for $0.99 on the Mac App Store! The small amount of money goes towards RoboBrrd and funding more development.

…have you ever wondered what ‘funding more development’ really means? I have, and I’m pretty sure the universal commonality between this is buying more junk food to keep us programmers happy. It probably changes from dev to dev though