Friday Night Robotics!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 15th, 2008

This is my Hockey MANOI work in progress robot. It needs a lot of improvement before I actually take it outside (hopefully there won’t be snow by then). It’s using a plastic stick that I found lying around (check out the pics)

So far it’s going okay, I guess. Trying to make a robot balance with many moving parts is difficult though, and really exhausting. There’s lots of things that I’ll need to fix… The program is basically a sequence of movements:

- Forward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times
- Backward 6 times
- Shoot 3 times

The Forward and Backward movements do vary slightly, but they both result in the robot going backwards. I’m trying to think of a way to fix it that will be the best way, like attaching a few heavy rocks to the front of the robot won’t be the best way in this case. Once the robot shoots after going Backward, there’s too much movement and it falls over.

I’ll probably have an if statement in the Shoot movement asking what was the last movement. If it was backwards, the shot will be more slow and less intense so it won’t tip over.

The stick also has to be mounted better… it moves WAY too much =P (those tie wraps serve no purpose)

Despite all of the falling over, it’s fun to be trial’ing and error’ing to see how the robot can balance And it’s working off of an Arduino! I plan to add the Wave Shield, with some hockey sounds/songs that MANOI can play — there will also be a FSR on the stick so the robot will know if it should shoot or not

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Yay!! Tonight I worked on my new/old robot… It’s the robot with the chassis of the Stanley robot that I started making at Stanford in the summer. It has a gerabox to power two motors for front wheel drive, plus there’s a servo to “steer” the gearbox.

The cool part is that I use a Wii nunchuck to control the robot Tonight I coded in which way is which- tilted to the left/front/back/right. The tilt to the back doesn’t work very often, so I have to fix it
By this point, you’re probably wondering where the pictures are I can’t upload photos with this version of wordpress (and I’m too sleepy to ftp them right now), but I’ll add them in tomorrow as I’m changing my blog to Wordpress 2.7 tomorrow, with a new theme I really really really like the new theme. It’s going to be awesome!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

LED Star Pumpkin

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, October 31st, 2008

I did make something for Hallowe’en… it isn’t much, but it’s just LEDs in a pumpkin in the shape of the star. The most time consuming part was cutting the wires and soldering them… plus, I had to solder a 1K Ohm resistor to each of the positive leads too. Then, I had to shrink wrap it so it wouldn’t short out (like some of the LEDs on BubbleBoy short out because I didn’t shrink wrap them).

It was okay- I wasn’t too pleased with the end result because I didn’t place the points on the star right… and I wanted to carve it out.

I knew from the start though that I want to re-use these LEDs, so I have them all connected into a small black box. Inside of the box is an Arduino - a RBBB. On the outside of the box held together by tape is the 9V battery and a latching switch.

The program basically cycles the LEDs like a marquee in HTML, then blinks them “seizingly” fast (LOL).

I think I may put the LEDs up in my window… it might look cool!

Posted in: Art, Projects.

Problem after Problem after Problem

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, October 16th, 2008

Wow, hahahaha I meant to post this yesterday! I wrote it all up… then forgot! Haaa woow

It really feels like I’ve been working on this software to control MANOI for ages now. On Friday I thought that I was really close to finishing off- that it would be so simple to send a variable from Processing to the Arduino.

Evidently, that assumption is DEAD WRONG! I have to send it through Serial. This raises many problems, like the possibility that the data might be fed to the SSC as well.

I’m now powering the SSC-32 by the Arduino. It’s plugged in to the Gnd and pin 6, so I can tell it to turn on or off. PLUS, I have a latching switch on the 5V, just in case.

So it almost feels like I can safely say that I’m really close to finishing off. I’m playing around with code that only sends data to Arduino when it knows it will receive it. Of course, when I try to send data to the SSC-32 it messes the whole process.

The moon last night (2 nights ago) was really bright… it looked pretty through my telescope This Harvest Moon is one of my favourites because you can see Tycho Crater.

Posted in: MANOI, Programming, Projects, Robot.

All Coding Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Woohoo! I fixed my soldering iron - it’s FANTABULOUS now! All I did was file it with an Xacto, and sanded it a bit. Now I can finally tin the tip (before I couldn’t) It’s amazing!

My two WiiChuck adapters are finished - I tried to make it work this afternoon, but for some reason the WiiChuck header file by Tom Igoe isn’t working!!! I’m confused… maybe it’s because I’m using Arduino 0012. I’ll be playing around with it more tonight.
The WaveShield is all soldered up I’m thinking about which song I should put on my SD card to test it out… hmmm

There’s so many fun things to do eeeeee all of them are now at the coding stage yay!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Fun Weekend Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 26th, 2008

This weekend is going to be pretty fun for me
I have soooo many things to play with, it’s going to be wickedly hyper awesome!

I went to the RobotShop and got my Lynxmotion SSC-32, Soldering station, and some female jumper wires, and a force sensing resistor!
The SSC-32 is awesome! I tried it out the other day, and my MANOI is ALIVE! I made it move its head
The only thing though is that I’ll have to power all the servos externally - which is okay now as I got a 12V DC transformer to plug into the breadboard
The soldering iron is horrible I was (and still am) trying to solder the Wave Shield, but the solder won’t stick to the iron So far it has taken me 3 hours (and counting) just to solder in the resistors. The iron doesn’t melt the solder, and the flux is GOOEY! It’s disgusting! I’m even trying lead solder (this stuff SUCKS) and it won’t work… going to try to sand the tip tomorrow, and see if it works better.

The old soldering iron literally exploded… so it’s in the garbage now.

I also bought a nintendo wii nunchuck (the accelerometer thing) to go with my WiiNunchuck Arduino adapters. I’ll be using it to control MANOI (and of course, many Processing programs)

I was playing around with the Fourier transform again today… and I somehow made it to morph time. It’s really freaky! I was recording sound, when my watch beeped. When I played back the sound (after the FFT alg) it was morphed… in a totally weird and unexplainable way XD kind of sped up, but also kinda moshed together…

This entire week I’ve been studying for the SAT. This pretty much involves me trying to sit in one place, focus on one thing, and not fall asleep/daydream for 4 ENTIRE HOURS! I just can’t stay focused that long… I make so many sleepy mistakes … I have absolutely no idea what to do. The real SAT is on October 4th (in 1 week) I’m not really in a panic as the test is so trivial and boring … I just can’t focus on one thing for more than 45 minutes! My brain is always in hyperdrive mode thinking about what ifs and whys… “Why exactly do they think this test evaluates your reasoning abilities” “What if they made this test interactive, like a game, on a computer?”

I’ve been asking what if and why a lot the past week… here’s some of the questions I can remember

What if time wasn’t measured in anything… but was just a continuous flow like a river
Why do we have to measure time?
Why do we always use graphs in two dimension? I don’t care about a squiggle function on a line… why can’t everything be graphed in 3 dimensions?
Why do we always round decimal points when it’s obvious it gives us inaccurate answers?
Why is the tinfoil on my lamp making high pitched noises like vibrations? Is it because of the heat… or did I just discover something I should look into further about light?
What if light had mass?
Why don’t we know what’s in/through a black hole?
What if we could make our own net of space and see how everything interacts with anything?
Why didn’t they put more corrector magnets into the LHC?
What if the computer isn’t monitoring enough information to really see what the Higgs is like?
What happens if they’re smashing the wrong particles together?
Why can’t they just model it on a computer?
Why is the LHC in a circle?
What would happen if it was in a spiral?
Why are my desks always messy?
What will happen when robots will become pets?
Why are people so judgemental about robots?
Why are robots stereotyped to be wirey and ugly?
What if the answer to better AI systems would be to create an “AI Internet” with many algs, and an API, to create a general AI?
What if cancer can be eliminated with the use of dandelions?
What if robots could code themselves and make better versions of their algorithms?
Why is random not random?
What if there were many robots in one square, and they were given random coordinates to navigate to and from? Would it be classified as swarm robots as eventually they will all converge?
What if I made a parrot robot that could read twitter feeds out loud, in a parrot voice?

So yeah… that’s pretty much the way I think all the time… I hardly can focus on one thing, ever!

Weeeee I can’t wait to get MANOI moving and waving this weekend!

Posted in: MANOI, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 12th, 2008

My Friday night robotics are BACK! Throughout the week I was working on speech recognition… Friday I took a bit of a break and soldered up the Motor Shield!
The Motor Shield is pretty awesome since it has 2 H-bridges. Soldering it up was pretty fun- even with a melted soldering iron!

Once it was all soldered up… I first tried the servos. Their motion is so much stronger than the servos I’m using in BubbleBoy! I’m going to try to use ServoTimer library on BubbleBoy again (previous attempts have been extremely frustrating). Maybe he’ll be more “emo”

The DC motors scared me as I extremely didn’t expect them to work the first time! Which is sort of ironic because, even though they did work, I didn’t have them plugged in right, so they didn’t move backwards. The solution was to not over-think it, and just plug it in (Like below)

The motors went to the GearBox, externally powered with +3V. The batteries were slowly fading away, so it became kinda fun to spin the gears

I made a video of my fingers spinning the gears (rofl):

So yeah… this is great! I’m probably going to make a shield for a RBBB to attach the motor sheild. Or something like that. I need to get one of those rechargable batteries wrapped in lime green shrink wrap as all of the motors will be powered. (There’s 4 of them!) It’s going to be a really powerful robot O_O

Oh yeah! I’m not sure what I did to my camera *coughdroppeditcough* but it takes REALLY nice pictures now… it does the effect that I’ve been trying to achieve on macro for ages now- softens the background a lot, crisp in the front (you can see it in the soldering iron pic). Yay!!

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.

Bad Day

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

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) .

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.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

RBBBs and Pololu SSCs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

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)!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.