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: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

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: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

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: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

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: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Refurbishing Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The missing parts to the TECHNOROBOT kit that I got at the explOratorium during the Stanford EPGY AI Program in 2008 have been found! This robot has been transformed many times, the first as an idea/prototype for an emotional line following robot, then a snowplow, and now it will be an XBee messenger robot!

Refurbishing it was OK, it only took 4 hours. The only thing that was drastically broken was the drive axel. To fix it, I used some Lego axels.

The robot now uses an Arduino, and is powered off of USB. The motor is driven with the Adafruit Motor Shield (I plan to add more motors to the robot someday). The motor is powered from an Adafruit mintyboost.

I broadcasted the refurbishment to the Fat Man and Circuit Girl stream, AND took a photo every 5 seconds! You can see the HD timelapse on Vimeo!

The next steps for this robot is rather short:

• Make a battery pack for the Arduino
• Attach XBee
• Mount an ultrasonic sensor, program a simple behaviour
• Transmit messages, listen to messages

Can’t wait to blog more about it!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Friday (Sunday) Night Robotics – XBEES!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 10th, 2009

This Friday (Sunday) I decided to put together the two XBee Kits that we got for Autonomous Robotics Club (ARC). Since its summer and the rest of the members are going to be busy, I get to be able to play with these all summer long!

Look at all the stuff!

XBees are familiar to me- I used them for a project a few months ago. That was so long ago that the XBee Kits used to be GREEN and not BLUE!

Everything was going really nicely, all of the soldering was perfect. Until I tried to plug the XBee in… it wouldn’t plug in. (?!?!!?!?!?!) I took the plastic part of the header off, check out what I found:

BLERG! I finally got the solder removed, but then when I was putting the plastic header back on, I noticed that there was a metal header missing! I found it on the desk, and I was trying to solder it back into place. This is how small the header is:

Another one came loose… here, you can see this:

I decided to just try putting the plastic back on and seeing if it worked anyway. Evidently, that was not possible to:

Even further ridiculousness:

BLERG! It’s amazing how devilish these headers can be. In any case, I’m going to go to the electronics store and pick up some headers and parts for RoboGlyphs tomorrow.

In any case, the 2nd XBee Kit was great!

(I also have the quadratic formula on a stickie, on my laptop. LOL!)

What will I use these for? I’m thinking that I will want to make a communication between BubbleBoy and MANOI. However, BubbleBoy (who would be ‘hard of hearing’) will seldom understand what MANOI ‘says’. I’m not entirely sure if I want to do this with math, or just easy programming.

Upcoming blog posts:
- iPhone Info Button Tutorial
- MANOI’s Inner Workings (a series of posts)
- RoboGlyphs

Also, I totally believe that Adafruit is copying my FNR tradition. Hahahaha

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.