Autonomous Robotics Club & National Robotics Week

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, April 11th, 2010

The first annual National Robotics Week is from April 10-18!

The Autonomous Robotics Club will have a special hack-a-thon at it’s regular Wednesday meeting time (8:00PM).

We have plenty of things to hack, including some NXTs, a Furby, Tuxdroid, iSobot, Sneezing Lamp Robot, BubbleBoy, MANOI, iRobot Create, NXTcamv3!

If you’re around Clarkson, why don’t you stop by the Autonomous Robotics Club room? Hope to see you there!

Posted in: Projects, Robot, School.

MANOI dancing to Yankadi

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Near the beginning of the Spring 2010 semester, a small activities fair was hosted for various clubs at Clarkson University. Autonomous Robotics Club originally didn’t have a table, but the orchestra let us have a little piece of theirs… =) Coincidentally, it was right near the Yankadi (west African drumming) club!

MANOI was running the Holiday Xtravaganza program, which made it look like it was ringing its bells in tune to the music!!! It was a really interesting sight to see, music from a robot and music from a group interacting together!

Here is a short video of some clips (mainly focussing on MANOI) of the event:

Music is a form of nonverbal communication, says Captain Obvious. So, it would be really worthwhile in the future to research how robots and humans can interact together through music. Perhaps in some elder care homes, drumming in a group with their personal robot (pets) can be a possibility! Maybe it wouldn’t be as intense drumming as this– it could be playing on a balafon or something.

The current elder generation has been closely tied with music… the radio was really popular back then, TVs weren’t all that common yet. Introducing personal robots into this type of a scenario would make sense, it wouldn’t be too intimidating for the elders since they have been accustomed to music for a very long time.

Here are two more videos of MANOI and Yankadi:

Yankadi is really great music activity since it’s so creative and doesn’t require any rhythm at all (if you’re playing in a big group). Plus, the sound is amazing!

Art and technology!! ^_^

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot, School.

Autonomous Robotics Club Meeting – Call for Electronic Junk!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, October 11th, 2009

This past week, we received the Blue-Bomber TGIMBOEJ! It came from Toronto, Canada. Here’s the blog post of the original creator of the Blue-Bomber box.

A TGIMBOEJ is a box of electronic junk! It stands for: The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronic Junk. People put electronic junk into a box, usually take pictures and blog it, and send it to someone else. The process repeats and repeats. The general rule is that if you take something out, you have to put something back in it. Possibly the most awesomest thing to explain to anyone who hasn’t heard of one before! ^_^

This is what it looked like when we got it:

There is awesomeness inside:

This one is my favourite thing in the entire box:

Do you know what it is? It’s a NEWTON PEN!!!!!!!! A PEN FROM THE NEWTON!!!!! (A Newton was the first PDA, the pre-iPhone)! A NEWTON PEN IS IN THE BOX!!!!!!!!!! Rest assured, I’m going to be swapping something in for that.

(That giant resistor makes me laugh)

So that was some of the junk in the box. The pink flower camera is still in there. The funny thing is about that camera, is that I have one at home, and it still works. Hahaha!

One of the projects that was going on that night was someone (also a robotics floor member) was trying to open up an old computer that he bought on ebay for $0.99! It’s a Packard-Bell, and it’s really old, but uncannily looks like the netbooks of today:

Above is the battery for the laptop. They didn’t even try to make it not look like a capacitor!

I think at the end of it, what was wrong is that the CMOS battery is dead. I’m not sure why he hasn’t replaced it yet, but I think it’s along the lines of he doesn’t have one (that isn’t dead). It’s a pretty cool project, neat to see what others are doing!

Anyway, when I got the BlueBomber I sent out an email to the ARC members requesting electronic junk, so that we can have a lot of stuff to swap out. The amount of junk we received was phenomenal. It was MOUNTAINS of electronic junk. MOUNTAINS OF JUNK!!! It was a super giant electronic junk party!

This is what a CRT actually looks like without the box:

This is what a human actually looks like with the box: (Rofl)

There’s so much soldering/desoldering to be done! I can’t wait to continue the electronic junk party this Monday, and perhaps work on iSobot more. One thing is for sure- I won’t be forgetting the desoldering pump!

If you have some electronic junk or know of people with electronic junk, feel free to let me know and we’ll take it off of your hands. Eventually the stuff that we don’t use will either be used for a new TGIMBOEJ, or will stay in the ARC room!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night and Monday Day Robotics – Moved!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, February 13th, 2009

This Friday was pretty interesting. All that was done was some work on two servo motors to create wheels for a simple robot that I want to create one day… but the main part was all of the packing!

All of the robotics stuff that I wanted to bring fit into two boxes! This was very convenient.

Everything got across the border just fine.

When Monday came, it was time to move everything in to the room of the Autonomous Robotics Club (at the University that I go to).

I really like the location of the club =) It’s right next to a dining place, seemingly the only one on campus that has tacos, fajitas, and quesadilas! ^_^

There’s a window, too. You can see the really nice view <3

I like the trees!

It took a total of 4 trips to get everything from my room to the ARC. See:

The cool thing about the ARC is that it shares the room with the Hobby Planes club! I like those planes a lot, they are all really detailed too. I know someone who makes hobby planes back in Montreal.

One of our first projects is a party button. So far there’s only a few members of the club. To attract new people to the club, we need to spice up the idea first… so what better to do than a party button!

The party button will be based on the famous MIT one, except ours will have more interactive things (like MANOI, BubbleBoy, and more). We’ll also have some funky lighting going on too.

I started adding some of the shiftOut chips to my shiftOut breadboard…

However, there is a giant problem! I connected everything, blah blah blah. BUT part of the wire broke off inside of the Arduino header!

Does anyone out there know how to fix it without making the Arduino deformed?

It’s quite sad to see an Arduino like this. If I can’t get it out, it would be deprived of the joy of shields… SPI… shiftOut… and more…

All in all, this weekend was super fun! I just wish I didn’t catch this whatever cold. I’m over it now (Tuesday) almost. At least I can speak again! Joy!! =)

This is the cabinet of mysteries (not really)

Posted in: Other, Projects.