RoboBrrd Building Video 1

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, November 27th, 2011

There was a lot of footage taken during the build of the latest RoboBrrd. Here is the first of these videos, there’s going to be a little over 10 in total!

Hope you enjoy the video, the series of videos will be a great companion to the Instructable. More of the documentation will be arriving online as we sort through it!

I started learning Eagle last week, it was quick to jump in and get started learning. There’s also lots of cool parts libraries out there with Arduinos or other various components that you would need.

Here’s me learning Eagle:

Here’s where the circuit is at right now. Have to add in the headers and such, and place it on the proto-screw shield!

More later!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Learning Pet at the Open Hardware Summit

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

Learning Pet had a fantastic time at the Open Hardware Summit!

Before the summit started, we were sitting at the sculpture robo-busking for votes! At that point, Ian came over and wanted to do an interview! It was an excellent interview, and he uploaded it really quickly at the summit so we could get more votes for the scholarship! Thanks Ian!

I actually did go to some of the talks! Specifically, the ones in the morning before the break. The Arduino Team’s keynote was really really great!

After that, I sort of hung around the cafeteria area showing off Learning Pet! A lot of people said they would vote, which was really great! After the crowd died down, I went into the cafeteria area to watch the stream and maybe work on some ADK stuff.

That was when the creator of ThingSpeak himself caught me and said Hello! ThingSpeak is a really cool Internet of Things website. It’s relatively small and new, which is why I like it compared to the others.

He told me about the location data parameter in the API. I never knew this existed! Then I was wondering how to get the location from Mac OS, if there was actually a framework for that. It turned out that there was! Wow! And it was since 10.6 too! I never knew this! Making it work was really great, it was only checking to see if it worked was what we really got caught on (because the XML file goes from oldest to newest).

It was then when I saw David Cuartielles from the Arduino team when I waved, who joined the table. We were talking about Learning Pet, and it turned out that he was the one who created the Processing ADK Tool! Wow! What a cooincidence!

I told him about all of the bugs, and asked how I can fix them. He showed me the code for the ADK tool, and walked me through how to build it in Eclipse! Building a tool for Processing is a little different because you have to tell ant that there are some things that are already pre-compiled, so it doesn’t have to check them.

I played around with the code for a while and sort of got used to the way things work. There are some places where it will be tricky to be able to do what I want to specifically do.

We also tried to figure out why there are four parameters on the Arduino side, and only three on the Android App side. It turns out that the Arduino is the one telling the Android what App it needs, rather than the other way around. This means that of course the Arduino side needs the description and website parameters. Which I guess makes more sense in retrospect

I’ll definitely be helping out more with this Processing ADK Tool stuff. The thing that motivates me the most is that when I first got the ADK and Android, I figured that this should be about 10x easier and 50x quicker than making an iOS App. It wasn’t, and many other people feel the same way, but now it is my goal to make it so.

We did listen to some of the talks while we were down hacking and learning on some code. They were really good! I didn’t manage to get to the breakout session, but they were all sort of scattered and I wasn’t listening to the directions anyway… playing with the code was more fun.

Oh yeah! And I also bought a hackerspace passport from Mitch Altman! It is so cool to see them in real life, they look like a real passport!

The Demo session was fun, lots of people loved Learning Pet and also said that they voted for it! However, when they announced the winners, Learning Pet didn’t place in the top three. I really appreciate everyone voting, though. To be honest and somewhat egotistical, I think Learning Pet’s documentation was the best and most complete. No one even came close!

Here is a video by johngineer about Learning Pet! Thanks johngineer!

The one thing that I would improve though, is to make the organizers a little more friendly towards everyone, and not just caring primarily about the sponsors. Yes, it is important to make the sponsors feel good since without them then there wouldn’t be this event, but it is also important to make the people at the summit itself feel good also. For example, at the demo session one of the organizers was talking with all of these sponsors in front of my demo area and goofing around and taking photos, but never bothered to say hello or ask about my project. It was sort of uncool and unmakerly (if that’s a word). The way I think of it is… you might as well be friendly to everyone, because we are all in this together!

All in all, the Open Hardware Summit was great for connecting with some of the people I have met online! It also turned out to be a great learning experience for building tools for Processing, and seeing how the Processing ADK tool actually compiles with API v10 rather than v7 (it is literally just setting the number different hahahaha)!

Also, Learning Pet appeared in the Adafruit blog randomly! It was awesome!

Posted in: Android, Fun, Projects.

RoboBrrd Documentation!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

The written documentation for how to build a RoboBrrd is on Make Projects! I had to get it done for the Make Bots with Character contest, competition is always a really powerful motivator for me.

I put a huge effort into the drawings to get them done before the deadline (drew each image myself). Here’s one of my favourite drawings from the bunch:

I was fortunate enough to have some good weather and tulips to take some decent photos of RoboBrrd:

Also created a summary video of RoboBrrd’s behaviours:

Considering how bad shape RoboBrrd was ONE week ago, it is amazing that it has come this far and this short amount of time. Last week there were problems with the LEDs, the communication between the boards, sometimes the motors didn’t work, the beak was loose, it was a big mess. Trying to fix the LEDs turned out being a huge ordeal.

The contest feels like it can go either way. I mainly want to spread the word about RoboBrrd, and being in the real Make magazine would accomplish that. I think RoboBrrd could inspire a lot of youth to take a stab at DIY robotics, instead of from kits and with stuff that they don’t have around their house (everyone has popsicle sticks and pencils, RoboBrrd is really accessible). It would be nice to see a flock of RoboBrrds at a Maker Faire one day MWUHAHAHA!

RoboBrrd was shown on Ask an Engineer last night! It was really cool, I’m uber humbled

All that is left now for RoboBrrd is more video tutorials and documentation! I’m going to challenge myself to get them all done this week, it will be interesting to see if I can accomplish the challenge! :O

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

January Happenings

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 1st, 2010

What has happened in January? Tons of stuff!

For Matlab this semester, it’s an independent project. I’m working with a friend to implement an adaptive online SLAM algorithm for an iRobot with a CMU cam and ultrasonic sensor. We want it to be able to reach a goal location even if objects are placed in front of it. I’ll be blogging more about this later, though.

The Social Robotics software that I worked on over the summer is now released under the GPLv3 license. I encourage everyone to check out the Social Robotics page if you want to learn more about the project! I am still in the process of creating the documentation and commenting for the code. As soon as it is complete, I will make a blog post. =)

Luckily for me, I took time to make detailed daily and weekly summaries. This will help a lot, plus it’s always neat to look back and see what the difficult parts were.

Did you hear/watch this year’s FIRST game animation? The game is about soccer! Team 229 has many useful links on their webpage that can fill you in.

This year I’m helping out with the website, maybe I will get to help out with some AI coding for the autonomous mode later on. It all depends on what the high school students think up!

I ended up adding a class two hours before the first lecture- Applied Statistics I. I don’t enjoy statistics very much since I have horrible memories of it from Math 536. But, once I gained access to view the class on the gradebook software, I immediately noticed two words:

SecondLife ……………… Project

Is this for real!?!?! It turned out that it is, and it is awesome! A friend and I are working on trying to figure out if there is a correlation between the virtual economy and the real economy. We’re going to focus mainly on North & South America, Europe and Australia.

Here’s a screenshot of my professor in SecondLife!

I’m taking a class on Computer Graphics. It’s really neat– I’m learning OpenGL!

OpenGL is something that I’ve wanted to learn for a while now. It’s actually quite simple when you’re given a template to work with!

Above is the first homework assignment! We were given a lot of time with it, which allowed me to play around with the code. I have to make the colours more plain before I hand it in, though.

I have no idea what I want to make with OpenGL at the moment. Maybe a moving robot? I definitely want to make some sort of game, though. (That way I can sell it on the iPhone App Store!)

That’s all for now. I’ll be blogging more about the Matlab project, since I think it’s going to be a hit!

Posted in: Animation, Art, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.