FEMSAPIEN ARRIVES!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009

WOOT!

It has been a long awaited day… the arrival of the Femsapien!

I won the Femsapien through a contest on Robots Podcast. The contest was to guess what the Femsapiens did while in Switzerland, and the answer was skiing! I really wanted to win, so I created a drawn animation with many guesses. Luckily, I guessed skiing and it was right!

The box has an awesome sticker on it!

That raised many eyebrows when people saw it.

The Femsapien looks very awesome and powerful. Almost as if she would laser beam someone who bugs her.

Unwrapping it reminded me of the way Barbie dolls are wrapped. They have these black plastic clips with intense wire wraps, “chaining” the doll down. For the Femsapien, it was the same thing, and equally EXCRUCIATING to unpack! It took a good 20 minutes to get to this stage:

I finally got her unwrapped. It is an awesome robot! I feel a little silly switching from she/it all the time… what would you classify this robot as? I call MANOI an it, so shouldn’t I call Femsapien an it? Or would that be offending not only the Femsapien, but humans as well? Hmmm…

I still don’t really understand how to make it walk and stuff. I like it when it dances though, the music is so funny It takes 3 AA batteries in each foot (that totals to 9V). I wasn’t expecting to need that many batteries! That’s a lot!

Anyway… I need to play with it a bit more

What I found REALLY cool though was how GREEN it is.

When you move a DC motor, it generates power. Usually, this power is sucked up by a diode.

However, in the Femsapien, this power is used to light up tiny red LEDs in her arm. That is SO COOL!

So, even when the Femsapien isn’t on, you can have lights.

Thanks a bunch Robots Podcast! I really appreciate this.

I think I will start hacking this on Friday-ish. I still want to play with it beforehand

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.