Friday Night Robotics – Hula Hooping Motion?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 24th, 2009

Building on last week’s RGB LEDs, it was time to add some motions to MANOI that would suit the carnival-ish theme.

A significant amount of time was spent on brainstorming ideas on how to make MANOI walk. The key will be the first step, as it has to get the rhythm started. The following steps will maintain the rhythm. Another point to look at would be shoes for MANOI. For walking, MANOI uses these ‘flip flops’ :

For skating, MANOI has roller skates that are made out of lego. These shoes are attached by velcro. It would be interesting to see if I could use some ShapeLock to make new shoes. (Shoes, Omg shoes. Shoes. Let’s buy some shoes!) By using ShapeLock, I may be able to eliminate some of the tilting that the velcro introduces, and thus eliminating another reason why the robot may fall.

In any case, I want to build on MANOI’s hip and leg motions like I did with the arm motions. I started with a simple swaying function, but Boom from the Robotics themed floor suggested an awesome suggestion- tilting the body to make it go forward and backward. In the right sequence, this would make a hula hoop motion!

It was interesting the way we did it. Instead of just telling the hip motors to tilt forward, we also told the shin motors to tilt backward. This maintained the center of balance.

We added onto this with arm motions. When MANOI tilts backwards, the arms go up. We tried keeping the arms up for tilting forward, but it shifted the center of balance too much.

Here are two videos of the motion:

There are more photos on Flickr!

I’m going to blog more about the Robotics themed floor later, as well as the Autonomous Robotics Club! =) I also adopted an iRobot Create recently, and I’m controlling it with an Arduino. It’s fun!

Oh yeah, and MANOI fell about 3 feet from a desk when its battery ran out. It survived just fine, and nothing was broken!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Wild Thing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, June 28th, 2009

This actually wasn’t on a Friday (Friday I was making an iPhone app), but rather Saturday.

Since the Sanguino requires too many female headers (which cost money, and I don’t have any), I decided to switch up to the Arduino MEGA. It fits in the box that is already there, so it is all good.

Originally I thought that the Wave Shield would work on the MEGA, but it turned out that it didn’t. What I ended up doing instead, though was using one of the MEGA’s extra Serial lines to send a command to another Arduino to start playing music (on the Wave Shield).

I used my iHome speaker thing that I bought at Walmart for $20. Pretty good value, and it’s purple.

It was pretty fun. However, I only used the motions that I created a while ago when MANOI’s knees were broken. A blog post is coming shortly about the previous FNR where I fixed the gears

I even attached a wild duck to MANOI’s head for the occasion:

Here is a video, it is not too good:

See, the problem in the video (when I had to shake it) was that the TX line to the SSC was loose. It does this from time to time. Especially after switching boards!

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.