Tuxdroid Unboxing

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, April 2nd, 2010

One long and labourious night at the COSI labs, some people were browsing ThinkGeek. They found this robotic penguin, Tuxdroid, and thought it would be perfect for the labs! It was ordered… and now COSI has a robot penguin! It’s a robot of the symbol of everything open-source! Fantastic!

It took a while to get all the way from Belgium to COSI, and it arrived the weekend of Boston FRC regional – March 26th! Everyone resisted opening it in the labs to wait for me… I really appreciated that! =)

Tuxdroid is basically like the Nazbaztag. Tuxdroid can interface with multiple applications on your computer to provide you with a real-world interface to them. A few of which are Skype, Gmail, RSS, and internet radio.

Tuxdroid can flap its arms, close/open its eyes, spin around, open its mouth, blink its eyes, detect light, and play sound. It’s a pretty good set of features that can communicate messages!

One of the best parts though is that you can make gadgets for it that execute code that you write! You can write whatever you want, and you can use Python! Tuxdroid already comes with some useful gadgets though, like saying random Valentine sayings, Christmas carolling, a sense of humour, etc.

It’s also wireless, and can span from about the COSI labs to the Concrete Cafe. That’s about 20m, I’d say? The wireless transmitter is a fish (that is FIRIN ITZ LAZORZ11!1). It has blue LEDs in its eyes that blink when not connected to the Tux.

That basically covers the unboxing of the Tuxdroid. It’s a pretty spiffy piece of equipment that adds spice to any computer lab! Of course, it has secret plans to take over COSI too…

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Creepyyy Furby Hack!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, March 5th, 2010

Pat (a fellow member of COSI), had an awesome idea of a hack. We could hook up an Arduino to a Furby to make it into a fortune teller! The idea is based off of one of those creepy fortune-telling devices or something.

So he brought his Furby after Fall break, and we opened it up.

Getting the skin off was easier than we thought it would be! Presto:

We did not expect to see as many gears as we did, check it out:

What on earth could all of those gears be for?!!?!

Here’s the wires on Furby’s right side:

Furby’s left side:

After doing some digging through the internet and just poking the Furby, we figured out that…:

• The gears control the movements of the Furby- there’s no microcontroller to do this! (Back side)
• The wires on the right side are for the IR emitter and detector and LDR in the Furby’s forehead (Right side)
• There’s a switch in the tongue! (Right side)
• The motor wires are the ones with the resistors (Left side)
• We still have no idea what those other wires do (Left side)
• The motor doesn’t work with just +5V… Hmmm!!!

Figuring out the motor was a huge roadblock. If we couldn’t figure this out… then it just wouldn’t work! A few months later of Furby sitting on my desk idly staring at me it hit me! I could use MANOI’s battery to power the Furby!

The result:

(Video on Flickr)

We’re still not too sure what to think about the result. It’s hilarious though!! There is motor burning smell when we run it, but nothing is hot. Weird eh!

All we have to do now is hook up the sensors, maybe add a speaker… and this could definitely provide some super lolz!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Light

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, January 23rd, 2009

For better or worse, I made a program for BubbleBoy that reacts to a light being turned on.

The program evaluates the light the same way MANOI’s hockey stick did. Once it goes over a particular threshold, it will begin to spin its hat and start saying “HELLO!HELLO!HELLO!”.

At first, I wanted to make BB react to sound, so I dismantled a “haut-parleur” that I got a while ago, thinking that it was a piezo speaker. It’s actually not a piezo, because when I was looking at the analog readings on the Arduino, nothing happened if I fiddled with it. Weird!

When it says on the LCD that I’m at “cheel”, it is hardcoded in. I tried to use the script that downloads a feed, but it doesn’t work for me, for some reason. I commented below that post with my setup and questions. =)

Aah I can’t wait until my Femsapien arrives from the EPFL! It is super boring without a humanoid to work on.

I’m not exactly sure what the moral of this FNR is supposed to be… annoy me and face ‘teh ultimate’ BubbleBoy?! Hahahaha

I’ll add the video later in another post, Vimeo has a wait time of 130 minutes – and YouTube … well who knows about YouTube. o.O

I’m going to be working on an AI Library for Processing with a few people here at the COSI (hopefully). Expect many more posts about that! Woohuu! =)

That’s all for now. *turns lamp off*

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot, School.