Apps4Arduino – SALE and INTRODUCING Buttons for Arduino!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011

=== SALE and INTRODUCTION! ===

Introducing Buttons for Arduino!

Interact with your Arduino in a quick, native and intuitive way using Buttons for Arduino!

=== Features ===

✔ Turn on and off your Arduino outputs with ease using the circle buttons
✔ Finely adjust the PWM outputs using the rotary sliders
✔ Customize button colours
✔ Full-screen mode (supported on 10.7+)
✔ No coding necessary
✔ API available

=== Works great for ===

:: Mood lighting – Have some LEDs connected to your Arduino for backlighting your computer desk, or similar? Easily control which LEDs are on and off to create a mixture of colours to suit your mood

:: Quick testing – Experiment with different outputs and combinations for your project, without touching a single line of code

:: Teaching students – Focus on the outputs and circuits without distractions. Demonstrate what happens when an output is on/off, and when the PWM changes from low to high

:: Live demos – Effectively communicate your project’s output ideas and concepts with others

:: And more! – Arduino projects are only limited by your imagination! Create the next best project, and use Buttons for Arduino to control it

To use Buttons for Arduino with your Arduino, install the ButtonsApp library from Buttons For Arduino’s support website and upload the included example sketch to your Arduino.

That’s it! Sit back, relax, and press some buttons!

Meters for Arduino and Buttons for Arduino are on SALE for $0.99 for a limited time! Celebrating the Open Hardware Summit and Maker Faire NY!

Get them on the Mac App Store here:
http://itunes.com/mac/buttonsforarduino
http://itunes.com/mac/metersforarduino

Also available as a tweetware option:
http://robotgrrl.com/apps4arduino/meters.php
http://robotgrrl.com/apps4arduino/buttons.php

Buttons for Arduino and Meters for Arduino are open source under the BSD 3-Clause License! Fork their repositories here:
https://github.com/RobotGrrl/Buttons-For-Arduino
https://github.com/RobotGrrl/Meters-For-Arduino

ENJOY!

Posted in: apps4arduino.

RoboBrrd Cosmic Soap

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 28th, 2011

Creating art with robots usually ends up with a result that is unexpected from the beginning! I created this fluid dynamics + physics sketch in Processing that was fun, and sort of looked like the soap from space. I connected it with RoboBrrd, and it was super unreal the result that it created.

Watch the video on YouTube

All sorts of people have different ideas about what it is, it seems to change from person to person, which is really interesting With RoboBrrd, since the light is being shone into its “eyes” (because the LDRs are located close to the eyes), lots of people have said it like a RoboBrrd hallucination. I’m not so sure about this, but playing with it is lots of fun, and shooting some long-exposure photos creates interesting results

My inspiration for creating this was lack of inspiration. I couldn’t focus on more important things to do, but at the same time I didn’t feel like doing nothing.

You can look at the code on GitHub. It’s commented and annotated, so it should be a good starting point if you want to create something like this.

Oh yeah, and to maybe answer a question you might be wondering- I’m not “on” anything. The only thing I’m “on” is my computer 18 hours a day, coding and creating.

If you use this sketch or make something similar, leave a comment with your project! It would be cool to see how this translates into other robot art

Posted in: Art, Programming, Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Android ADK Robo-Wizard Project Progress

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 21st, 2011

Finally got an Android phone that works with the ADK!

The ADK is really pretty, except that you can’t really add on more things to it. I carefully soldered on some headers that will let me plug things in:

Also added on some wires to extend the digital outs on the side. Actually, the piece of wire is from recycled e-waste!

This is the app so far. Sensor readings at the top, and buttons in a circle.

The buttons are used to create a spell. The more letters are in the spell, then the more magic power it has. The magic power is indicated by the LED lights in the above photo. The goal is to be able to use the phone as a magic wand, using the accelerometer, to compose the spells. To shoot the spell, you press the GO! button, or the gold Android on the ADK, or it auto-shoots when the magic power is at its highest.

I use this magic power to control RoboBrrd over the mesh network!

You can see the video of it working, with an explanation of everything, on YouTube:

Isn’t it kind of crazy how there isn’t many Android ADK hacks out there yet? When I search the tag “android adk” on YouTube, there are only 157 results. Even more creepy, searching “adk” under Java on Github, there are only 11 repositories.

I’ll be making some tutorials for the Android ADK for the apps4arduino site soon!

Posted in: Android ADK.

Apps4Arduino

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 15th, 2011

This past week I have been working on a project that I’m really excited to unveil to everyone It’s called Apps4Arduino, and its purpose is to showcase the software that we are making for cool hardware projects, and to help others get started with their own software adventures for their hardware projects.

We created Matatino, which is a Cocoa framework for Mac that provides a straight-forward way to communicate with your Arduino through its serial connection.

To demonstrate Matatino is Meters for Arduino, which is old VU meters for your analog inputs on Arduino. Here’s a video of Meters for Arduino in action:

The code for Matatino and Meters for Arduino is released open source under the BSD 3-Clause license. You can find out more details on their pages.

As for the name “Matatino”… It took an insane amount tries to get the license and naming right for this framework, that we had to just take it one step at a time. Basically a Hakuna Matata chillout (because apparently these two words will solve all your problems!). So, Mac + Hakuna Matata + Arduino = Matatino!

Go and visit the website to learn more about Apps4Arduino- really excited to see what people will make with it!

Posted in: apps4arduino.

Robot Mesh Network: RoboBrrd and MANOI

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

The robot mesh network finally worked last night! Whenever the PIR sensor on RoboBrrd was triggered, MANOI would do a BAJNGL (both arm jingle) move. Here’s a video, there’s even live debugging in the video because there were some loose wires on MANOI’s SSC-32 that weren’t there when I tested everything (of course) bahaha:

View the video on YouTube.

The code can be found on Github.

There are other posts on the tag robot mesh network that you can look at if you want other videos on how they work on the mesh network

Here are some randomly ordered thoughts:
- Doesn’t use XBee API mode, because I could never make it work
- Not sure why RoboBrrd’s eyes weren’t blinking :S They do blink when I power the Arduino UNO (Communication board) instead of the Arduino MEGA (Main board).
- Need to make MANOI’s communication board loop a bit more fast & optimal
- RoboBrrd’s beak looked funny because the popsicle stick bindings are all loose
- RoboBrrd’s base needs to be painted
- YodaBot needs to get its wiring redone for inter-board communication
- The bugs I encountered were:
-> An interrupt pin that was triggered whenever touching the wire. Fixed by changing the Arduino. (This one tripped me up for two days, it was extremely tricky to debug)
-> XBee couldn’t send out. FIxed by swapping the XBee.
-> NO TX/RX BUGS FOR ONCE! YAY!

I hope to link together more behaviours between MANOI and RoboBrrd! Networking the robots together is amazingly fun ^^, and it lets me do something that I’ve always wanted to do, let robots communicate with each other. It will be interesting to see what can happen when we add Yoda Bot into the mesh

You’ll be hearing more about RoboBrrd as I’m going to try to enter it into the MAKE Bots with Character contest! Yay!

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

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

RoboBrrd is on the Mesh Network!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, May 9th, 2011

This is just a quick few sentences update to say that RoboBrrd is successfully on my robot mesh network! WOOHOO!

Had some horrible interrupt bugs that were resolved by switching out the main controller board (Arduino Diecimila 328) with an Arduino MEGA.

The communication board is spread out all over RoboBrrd’s back flap, I’m going to solder up the proto screw shield that was designated for RoboBrrd #2 and use it with this RoboBrrd #1 anyway. Since I have accidentally destroyed many servos with RoboBrrd #1, the possibility of a second RoboBrrd might not be realized.

Hopefully I will be able to show you this in action with a short video (unrelated to the tutorial series) tomorrow! The idea is to show RoboBrrd reacting to the PIR sensor, sending a command to the mesh network, and MANOI will be reacting to the command.

I posted some of the code and resources on Github. You can look at it, but please know that I’m going to improve it and make it a lot easier for everyone to use a little later on.

Next few days are going to be crazy, since I need to get RoboBrrd going to enter it into the MAKE robot competition. So much documentation of the design, circuits, and code has to be done!

BTW, I was selected for the WWDC Student Scholarship! Really excited

More details later!

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!).