BubbleBoy is not Characterful

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

FUDGE!
BubbleBoy did not win, nor PLACE in crabfu’s ‘Most Characterful’ competition.
I don’t understand how it didn’t… My source and schematics are even open!!
This extremely sucks as I wanted to win so badly as I don’t have the money to buy a serial servo controller Fudge!! Will MANOI forever be in a box? Talk about unethical treatment to a robot… (You wouldn’t keep a cat in a box* for a month would you?! why would a robot be any different?!)
* Schrodinger’s cat is an exception

I guess I poured too much creativity and florescent pink and lime green paint into it Grr! Either that, or it doesn’t even count as a robot since it doesn’t show its wires.
Although it is only “one contest” it was only an EXTREMELY GIGANTICOR SUPER DUPER CONTEST that I really wanted to win so I can work on my other robot so I can win other contests so I can pay for parts to keep researching robotics!!!!
sigh…

Posted in: News, Robot News.

More BubbleBoy

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 8th, 2008

Even more BubbleBoy awesomeness

And here’s the circuit diagram!

I hope I entered crabfu’s most characterful robot contest correctly. The deadline said: 09/08/08 at midnight — but it almost sounds as if it’s already closed and so now I’m so worried that I didn’t even enter and I won’t even be considered so therefore I wouldn’t stand a chance :’( I HATE TIMEZONES!!! :( Let’s just all hope that it is entered in the contest…
Update: Everything is okay. I’m entered in the contest!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

BubbleBoy Finished

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, September 4th, 2008

Yay! BubbleBoy is finished (version 1). Briefly, BubbleBoy was created to demonstrate emotions and their applications in robotics. BubbleBoy has a food and water level, and when averaged out, a health level. The mood is determined by the health level. There are 10 moods, each of which BubbleBoy has a little ‘action set’ with. This is to try to get more food! After the ‘action set’ is over, you can feed it or give it water. When the food/water button is pressed, it increases the food/water level by a random int in between a lower bound and upper bound. Also, when BubbleBoy finishes three ‘action sets’, it becomes more hungry and thirsty - thereby decreasing the food/water levels. So, BubbleBoy is similar to a ‘tamigotchi’. It was fun to make- BB has 2 servos, 2 DC motors, 2 buttons, 4 LEDs, 1 LDR, and 1 LCD. All of these are controlled by the Arduino board.

The source code is here! There are no comments in the code yet (they’re all in my brain at the moment, haha).

Although I said (on Wednesday) that this was going to be posted tomorrow… it’s actually early Friday. BUT, since I haven’t slept yet, it’s still Thursday to me :] I had so much trouble getting the footage from the tape recorder onto the mac! It seemed to be like technical difficulty after technical difficulty the entire time. I’ll post more details tomorrow about the schematics… to be honest I forgot if I used pull up resistors or not! So I have to check…

All the awesome pictures! The plastic was painted green, and the push buttons were created

There’s BubbleBoy!
The future versions will employ ‘expectations’. For instance, when BB is fed, it will record the LDR value. If after three action sets and the LDR value is the same… it will expect to be fed! If it’s not fed, then it will become more hungry or thirsty since it was somewhat ‘disappointed’ because it wasn’t fed.
Schematics and fancy vocabularized blurb tomorrow

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

BUBBLEBOY TOMORROW!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008

Tomorrow I’ll be finishing off BubbleBoy, posting the schematics, the code, pictures, and videos! Woohoo!

I might even write a fancy shmancy few paragraphs about how scientific it is.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Dormant Blogging

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, August 29th, 2008

Dormant blogging kills the robot star
BubbleBoy is doing good- and looks EXACTLY like a pink snowman with the scarf, which is what I was aiming for.
The coding is going good… it’s all really simple Check out this video of cycling the health levels. For health >= 90 there is an action, but the others there isn’t yet because I haven’t programmed it yet teeheehee.

The video is really slow… as the delay between cycles was 10 seconds At the end you’ll see BubbleBoy’s ‘behaviour’ for health >= 90.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

BubbleBoy’s Hello World!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, August 18th, 2008

Woooaah! I wanted to make this blog post yesterday, but there was an insane storm! So I’ll just fake the date as Monday even though it’s Tuesday.
I’ve been working on BubbleBoy a bit, and I’ve got it to a state where it is Hello World!
Here are pictures of the progress!

I started out with the BubbleBoy seen a few months ago, then added more and more and more to it, like a DC motor for a hat, a vibrating DC motor for the hula-ring, 2 LEDs and a LDR, two buttons, and the LCD. It doesn’t sound like much, and it really isn’t, but it certainly filled up the inside of the box pretty fast. The box is one of those Sundae ice cream ones.

You might be wondering what the two buttons and LCD are for… the two buttons are for food and water respectively, and the LCD will display BB (bubbleBoy) ’s current mood, thirstiness, hungriness and overall health. The things that will influence BB’s mood will be the LDR, and the thirstiness and hungriness. So, it will sort of be like a physical tamagotchi! The LEDs on BB will indicate if BB becomes thirsty or hungry. If BB is in the dark, the happiness will decrease as it will be “afraid” of the dark.

The bunches of photos above are the calm before the storm of the entanglement of the wires from BubbleBoy to the ProtoShield on the Arduino.

The last photo, above, was when I realized I forgot to plug in the Arduino

Yay! So, it’s all working now and just has to be programmed from the pseudo-code in my head. The main problem I faced was trying to debug the dead DC hat motor… there were so many things that could have been wrong, like the TIP 121, Diode, short circuit, batteries… but I guess I debugged in the right order - saving the snipping of the DC motor until last. The DC motor didn’t work at all, so it was completely dead. Luckily, the other one I had worked just fine
I’m going to have to do a lot of playing around with the hula ring … it doesn’t move as much as I wanted it to I’m also adding a scarf (that I had a nightmare about a few days ago) and eventually will paint the box LIME GREEN
The point of finishing this robot is not only to finish another robot, but I’ll also be entering it into crabfu’s Most Characterful contest. The prize is $100 that can be spent in the TR store… and look what’s really cool there! The Lynxmotion servo serial controller! If I won, I could buy one to replace the two dead Pololu SSC’s to make my MANOI work! =D!!! It would also be handy to have one of these Pan and Tilt devices for Phoenix … It woould also be great to have many FSRs for Phoenix too And a temp sensor! I’m just worried that no one will like BB as it’s pink and tidy ;(

Here’s a video of the hat spinning, and the Hello World program!

more to come soon!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.