Adafruit HQ Fun

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

Woohoooo! I finally had the opportunity to visit Adafruit HQ! Back on Sunday October 21, 2007 was when I ordered my first Arduino Duemilanove from them, and then later became actually interested in electronics! Their tutorials have helped me along the way, so it was totally a blast to go there and see them in human form again, check out their pick and place machine, say hello to the Adabot character, and learn even more!

The Adabot puppet is really interesting. It is fabulous looking in real life. With Adabot, they are taking the approach that robots are friends, which is really nice! Just like RoboBrrd! They can both be friends!

The pick and place machine… wowza, I was amazed to see it in person. Think of all the technical details that have to go in to a machine like this! Vision, programming, mechanical! There are trays and reels from which it can take the parts from. It places the pieces on the board from checking on its vision system. Plus, it even knows when it drops a component. Not only all of this, but your circuit creations can be functional in seconds rather than hours of soldering. It’s just wicked!

RoboBrrd wants a pick and placed brain some day…

ladyada is an inspiration, and the pick and place machine is stellar!

After the tour was done, they let me choose stickers! I kind of went out of control, but check out how great the RoboBrrd travelling case looks now! Thanks for the stickers Adafruit

In return for the visit, I said I would make some sort of Adabot head with servos. I’m probably going to revise this idea into some sort of goofy project enclosure to hide your Arduino project in, and it will also have servos for the antennas. Well, more on this later since there’s a lot of pre-existing work to get done before a next project.

Hackerspace passport was STAMPED!

Thanks Adafruit for the tour! It was a blast!

Posted in: Fun, Maker Faire, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RobotGrrl Interview with Robots-Dreams

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 30th, 2012

While at RoboGames I had the opportunity to meet Lem from Robots-Dreams! I’ve been a big fan of that site for a while, so it was quite the pleasure when Lem asked if he could interview me.

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!

Posted in: Fun.

RoboBrrd Mesh Network- Pulse Sensor and HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, March 2nd, 2012

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ROBOBRRD!

Today is a SUPER day and here are some treats that you and RoboBrrd can enjoy! Or maybe just RoboBrrd will enjoy it, but anyway here they are!

Here is the video about the RoboBrrd Mesh Network: Pulse sensor! This was shown a while ago on the Adafruit Ask an Engineer Show n Tell Google+ Hangout (that’s AAAESNTGH for short)! It’s a little long, but if you can bear with my umm’s and uhh’s, it’s a pretty cool demo. Watch it on YouTube!

The pulse sensor sends data to both RoboBrrds, and the orange RoboBrrd (Impy) sends what hat it is wearing to blue RoboBrrd (Learning Pet). You can look at the code on Github here, and check out the XBee Network Protocol here!

NEXT UP is this really cool new web badges portal by Adafruit. The aim is that their badges and online portal will become ‘Scouts 2.0′, giving out badges to kids for accomplishing electronic goals! They let me beta test it early, so RoboBrrd is up there with it’s Robot Badge!

It’s going to be really interesting to use the API for stuff. For example, one day in the future, when you first load your code onto your RoboBrrd and connect it to the ‘Hello Brrd World’ Processing sketch, then DING it will use the API and contact the adafruit badge servers, and you’ll instantly be awarded a Robot badge! Maybe there will even be a RoboBrrd badge! I dunno how they’re going to handle the authentication for the API keys, but that will be interesting to see.

Check out RoboBrrd with the Robotics badge! Woootooo!

Today is the kickoff day for the Cloud Robotics Hackathon! I’m really looking forward to working together with my team. There’s going to be a little bit of everything in our project, and you can listen for quick updates @RobotGrrl! The hashtags are going to be #roboticshackathon, #cloudrobot, #cloudrobotMTL. There will be a special Robot Party on Saturday at 8PM ET! See you then!

That just about wraps up the birthday post for RoboBrrd! It has been a BLAST! And the next 100 years are going to be even BETTER! Thanks to all the friends who enjoy keeping up with RoboBrrd’s progress! HIP HIP HOORAY!

Posted in: Fun, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), WyoLum Progress.

RoboBrrd Documentation!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

The written documentation for how to build a RoboBrrd is on Make Projects! I had to get it done for the Make Bots with Character contest, competition is always a really powerful motivator for me.

I put a huge effort into the drawings to get them done before the deadline (drew each image myself). Here’s one of my favourite drawings from the bunch:

I was fortunate enough to have some good weather and tulips to take some decent photos of RoboBrrd:

Also created a summary video of RoboBrrd’s behaviours:

Considering how bad shape RoboBrrd was ONE week ago, it is amazing that it has come this far and this short amount of time. Last week there were problems with the LEDs, the communication between the boards, sometimes the motors didn’t work, the beak was loose, it was a big mess. Trying to fix the LEDs turned out being a huge ordeal.

The contest feels like it can go either way. I mainly want to spread the word about RoboBrrd, and being in the real Make magazine would accomplish that. I think RoboBrrd could inspire a lot of youth to take a stab at DIY robotics, instead of from kits and with stuff that they don’t have around their house (everyone has popsicle sticks and pencils, RoboBrrd is really accessible). It would be nice to see a flock of RoboBrrds at a Maker Faire one day MWUHAHAHA!

RoboBrrd was shown on Ask an Engineer last night! It was really cool, I’m uber humbled

All that is left now for RoboBrrd is more video tutorials and documentation! I’m going to challenge myself to get them all done this week, it will be interesting to see if I can accomplish the challenge! :O

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RoboBrrd: Three Bad Things

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, April 9th, 2011

I like to think of robotics as the art of trying to accomplish something despite the numerous things that don’t work. Last week, before heading off to GTR, I made an effort to try to get a RoboBrrd video done. It didn’t happen, because there was a crazy number of things that didn’t work.

I tried to use the TLC5940 chip that also controls RoboBrrd’s eyes to control the servos. It was hard to set up because there had to be many short wires attached to places that already had a lot of wires attached. I used two LiPo’s in series as the battery, for a total of 7.4V. Some of the servos were working, some were acting funny. I added in a 10uF capacitor to see if filtering the voltage would help. One of the servos stopped working… I wondered why, and read the product’s specs (this is probably best done BEFORE you start to do anything with the product). They are only rated for 6V!

The TLC5940 was sloppy at controlling the servos anyway, so I decided to go with the servo library. At this point, I also needed a voltage regulator to bring down the voltage to 5V. I got the LM317, and prototyped it on a breadboard first. It seemed to work okay, so I soldered it onto the protoboard. Once I plugged in a servo, the voltage would drop down to 2V, and the servo wouldn’t move. After much help with the kind people in irc.freenode.net#fmcg, we deduced that I used the wrong pinout for the plastic package. See, the old guy at the electronics store printed out the first page of the LM317 datasheet and kindly drew on it the pinout. The pinout he gave was wrong.

Once the LM317 issue was fixed, it was getting extremely hot. This was quickly and easily fixed with a giant heatsink.

The final issue was encountered during the Robot Party on Thursday. There’s some sort of conflict between the TLC5940 library and the servo library. On the higher level, the Tlc.init() function is causing the problem. I haven’t looked into the lower level causes of it yet. Has anyone else had this problem?

The RoboBrrd videos have to start rolling, so I decided to throw in another Arduino to quickly fix the issue. It would be great to find a better solution, though.

You can see the video LIVE on Ask an Engineer tonight! Woohoo!

Or, you can watch it here:

There is still a lot of stuff that I have to do, but we’re at a good place now to start the videos. Here’s a list:
- Add in sensor functionality to RoboBrrd
- Make the base able to move
- Cover the other panels with green felt
- Decorate the base
- Make RoboBrrd #2 so #1 can interact with it (so it won’t be lonely)

When the videos get rolling, that’s when more of the DIY posts will start showing up!

There are a bunch of new photos in the RoboBrrd collection for your viewing pleasure!

This is a really exciting robot, and thanks again to Adafruit for sponsoring all of the electronics. Woot woop!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RoboBrrd Making

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

This past week RoboBrrd has made immense progress, you can look at all the photos on flickr! I haven’t made any videos yet, but once I get RoboBrrd #1 complete, I will have a better idea of the challenging parts of the construction so I’ll be able to make more comprehensive videos.

Improvement #1 over the prototype version was to use pencils instead of coffee stir sticks for the structure (thanks Sean for the idea)!

One of the things I love most about making your own robots by hand are the quirks that you encounter. Cool things that happen when you don’t expect it. RoboBrrd’s beak can go from an overbite to an underbite! This could add a lot of dramatic effects to it. I guess an underbite would be a grumpy bird?

Looking at all the wires now, glad that there is a Proto Screw Shield on the Arduino. Wires popping in and out drive me bananas!

I’m excited to drive these LED’s with a 74HC595, a PWM shift out chip. Remember the RoboGlyphs? I wasn’t able to drive them with a TLC5940 because they were common cathode. Thank goodness for these RGB LEDs, common anode!

Thanks to techsurvivor, he came up with a cool and creepy name for the video series: RoboBrrd’s Inrrds (pronounced robo bird’s innards). Playing on words is fun.

Also, pretty much everyone won the naming contest from the previous post. Thanks to everyone who suggested names! Specifically, I Heart Robotics is the winner!

RoboBrrd is shaping up to be the most fun robot I have ever designed! Hopefully you all will enjoy it too, once I get more documentation done All that is left to do is the circuit, the body/base with the pan&tilt or whatever it is (should probably figure that out before making the video), and some sample code (here’s to hoping that the claims of 12 servos on an Arduino is possible)!

Thanks to Adafruit Industries for the electronics!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Adafruit + RobotGrrl Team Up

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Adafruit Industries and RobotGrrl are teaming together to unleash a super build-a-long robot video series!

The idea is to have a video each week about robotics. The best way to learn about robotics is to dive in head first, so we will be making a sociable bird robot out of popsicle sticks, coffee sticks, hot glue, and electronics from Adafruit.

The videos will serve as a great way to become introduced to the various aspects that are involved with the construction of robots. The exciting part about this is that the robot is not a “traditional” metal and wheels robot. Not all robots have to be made out of metal, and they don’t always have to have wheels. They have to be able to sense and react to their environment.

We’ll be delving into this more in the videos, but here are some teaser photos of prototypes of the bird robot…

All of the files and software that will be used in the making of the robot will be open source too.

There is one teeny tiny problem though… this robot doesn’t have a name! WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT!?!? Leave a comment here (or anywhere I will notice it) with a cool name suggestion. If yours is the coolest, it will be chosen!

Thanks very much to Adafruit Industries for funding parts for the robot and the the opportunity!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).