PowerMac G3 and eMate 300

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, April 26th, 2011

The lead teacher for the Northern Knights FRC 296 has bestowed upon me some pretty cool hardware to play with (thanks so much!) for poking around some old Newton development!

Why Newton development? The end goal would be to have the eMate 300 controlling the robots, ALL of the robots in the mesh robot network. The eMate 300 would be the ultimate master watchdog! What exactly am I envisioning using the eMate 300 that the iPad can’t do now?

Newton has pretty amazing hand-writing recognition, it would be fun to be able to write to one of the robots, and have them pass the message along. You could probably argue that the iPad can do handwriting recognition thanks to the WritePad SDK, but there are so many legalities involved with 3rd party development SDKs that it might not be worth it.

eMate 300 has a hardware keyboard, so you can press buttons. :3 Also, the iPad can’t glow the same way that the eMate 300 does.

Basically, the eMate 300 is old, I have it now, and I want to use it

The eMate 300 has this on its side, it almost looks like the same size as those WiFi cards. Maybe it is? This will be interesting to investigate further.

The bottom of the eMate has a tripod mount. This will be epic for controlling the robots, it will be standing up!

There are two ports on the eMate 300, a rectangle one and a Mac Serial Connection … I think? There’s also an IR link, but I forgot to take a photo of it.

The keyboard, there’s buttons and sliders!

So how on earth do you make “Apps” for this? Using an old computer of course! So much cool old stuff!

It’s a PowerMac G3, and it’s probably the most super computer ever for running Mac OS Classic.

We’re safe! It’s a PowerPC!

They had firewire back then? o.O

NETSCAPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Diving into Newton development will be fun. Making it communicate with an Arduino will be spiffy!

I’ve been surfing around and I found two cool things that readers of this might be interested in too, a PowerPC Emulator and a Newton Emulator.

There will be more Newton posts in the future!

Posted in: Newton, Projects.

IZ NOT SLACKING!11!1 :P

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

I’M NOT SLACKING… (on blogging). OK, well, seeing the title of the blog post pretty much means that I am slacking (on blogging). BUT I’VE BEEN DOING SO MUCH AWESOMENESS THAT IT NEVER STOPS IN TIME TO BLOG!!! WAHJKFHJKASLJKF!

Here is what I have been up to the past 4 weeks (in chronological order from oldest to newest):
- Got serial data (from BubbleBoy’s LDR) to go into Matlab very easily
- Read lots of robot books
- Wrote a paper on the ethical dilemmas of the 3 Laws
- Got iRobot to work (drive in a straight line)
- Got MANOI to walk
- Worked on a presentation for the paper
- Programmed MANOI to shake hands for the presentation (and I did this like 5 hours before the presentation and had a potential disaster, but it worked in the end)
- Worked on a cookie mover robot
- Got a CMU cam
- Ran a Girl Scouts Robotics Activity (cookie mover robot)
- Working on a MATLAB program for BubbleBoy that can make it speak, play songs on iTunes, use AI
- Working on a Processing sketch that displays RSS feeds, nicely

That’s 12 blog posts that I have to write! They are all really cool too… I think the programming MANOI to shake hands will be the funniest blog post.

This also means that I have achieved a goal that I have had for 3 years… MANOI can walk!

I’m also continuously working on improving my code from the summer that socializes a social robot using an artificial society. One of the main differences is that in the summer it only worked for 1,000 iterations. Now the program can do over 1 million iterations… until infinity! So I have to make the patterns more evident and last longer… which is a trial and error thing, really.

More later!

Posted in: Other, Projects.

Stanford’s Version of MIT OCW

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 19th, 2008

Looks like Stanford has their own version of MIT OCW with some neat courses up! It’s called Stanford Engineering Everywhere.

I’m just looking at the Machine Learning course now… it looks pretty fun – definitely worth checking out

SEE

Posted in: News, Other News.