Maker Faire 2012 was FANTASTIC!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, May 21st, 2012

It was a huge celebration of creativity! Many cool projects that inspired lots of people to go and create something new!

RoboBrrd had a great time at Maker Faire! The trick with the hats was a hit, and the new laser cut RoboBrrds gained much interest as well! A lot of students came away being inspired to make similar robots, and hopefully a RoboBrrd some day!

Also became a beta tester for the Arduino DUE

And won 2 Editor’s Choice awards, and an Awesome award!

Thanks everyone for the amazing weekend! This was truly a treat, and it was a ton of fun to meet everyone and hang out together. The Bring a Hack dinner was great

SEE EVERYONE NEXT YEAR! Hope to see everyone next year, 2013! Or possibly Maker Faire Kansas City and New York!

This was a triumph, making a note here: huge success

What are you waiting for? Start working on your next robot / project!

There will be a few more posts coming soon with more details about this wonderful Maker Faire. I made a RoboBrrd each night during Maker Faire, so will definitely be blogging about that! Woop woop, more later!

Posted in: EMSL, Maker Faire, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RobotGrrl Interview with Robots-Dreams

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 30th, 2012

While at RoboGames I had the opportunity to meet Lem from Robots-Dreams! I’ve been a big fan of that site for a while, so it was quite the pleasure when Lem asked if he could interview me.

Here’s the interview, it’s 14 minutes long, it was really fun to do!

The interview ended up getting a lot of blog love! It was posted up on the MAKE blog, Arduino blog, and Adafruit blog.

Wow! This was pretty crazy in a good way, so thanks guys! The video is getting close to 10,000 views!

More blog posts are in the pipeline, so keep your robo-eyes peeled!

Posted in: Fun.

National Robotics Week – Robot Party tonight!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, April 12th, 2012

You’re invited to the Robot Party, tonight at 8PM ET! Join us for lots of fun, knowledge, and robotics! If you have a robot, bring it to the Google+ Hangout (make sure I have you in my circles)! Or, you can watch the stream on the page!

Looking forward to your robots! SEE YA THERE!

ALSO! I’ll be giving a talk at RoboGames about the Robot Party! It will be a lot of fun, looking forward to seeing everyone there! Crossing my fingers that I’ll be able to display my robots as well!

:::

What is the Robot Party?

The Robot Party is a weekly Google+ hangout that brings together robot builders from all over to share their robots, knowledge, and ask questions! It is for all age ranges, young or old, just bring your robot!

The Robot Party is every Thursday at 8PM ET! If you have a robot, join the hangout on Google+! Be sure to leave a comment on one of the posts so we can add you to our circles for the party. If you don’t have a robot/don’t want to be in the hangout, you can watch the Ustream mirror!

:::

robotgrrl.com/robotparty
nationalroboticsweek.org

:::

Uploaded lots of pics from some various Robot Parties last night! Check them out!

April 5, 2012

August 11, 2011

September 22, 2011

More photos coming soon- I pick them out all by hand, so it sometimes takes a while!

SEE YOU AT THE ROBOT PARTY!

Posted in: Robot Party.

Cloud Robotics Hackathon!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

I was at the Cloud Robotics Hackathon this weekend in Montreal and it was a BLAST! There were tons of teams participating, learning about robotics, programming with Arduino, and there was a MakerBot, some Naos, and a Darwin-OP there! Holy macaroni!

My favourite part at the end was listening to the experiences that people had programming their robot. There were lots of new people to robotics, so it was great.

I worked with Marek over the weekend! He is a super web dev guru, and was also on the Edubotics team at Startup Weekend Montreal. We came up with a pretty crazy project, under the team name of TEAM LIGHTNINGBOTS, because lightning comes from the cloud!

We ended up winning the Montreal part of the Cloud Robotics hackathon! Here is our project’s video!

As a quick summary, we made a network of cheerleading robots for an educational math game that can post the scores on MyRobots, then display them on a robotic scoreboard. Let’s take a look at this in more detail!

Here is the basic setup. There is the math game on the iPad. This app is actually a web app with a very thin native client layer to send data to the robot. It works by sending HTTP callbacks, which the app parses, then sends a packet through the Redpark Serial Cable, which Learning Pet (blue RoboBrrd) receives, parses, then does an action. You can input two digit numbers into the app because there is a specially-tuned delay to do so. You get an unlimited number of tries for answering, and no hints, since this is a basic version of it (proof of concept). The green dots below are showing the number of questions completed and needed to level up. The game repeats once you level up. The game is functional in any modern web browser, so you can check it out HERE! Marek was the one who coded this, and it was developed beforehand at Startup Weekend, so nothing new here.

Now for the new part: when Learning Pet (blue RoboBrrd) receives the data from the app, it also broadcasts the message out through its Xbee to the other two robots. We use the XBee Network Protocol for this, developed by Kris Kortright, but we use my uno-compatible fork of it.

Both Impy (orange RoboBrrd) and MANOI receive this data through their XBees, and are able to act out the actions as well. When you get the answer right, they do a little action of encouragement (MANOI swings its arms, RoboBrrds flap their wings, and Impy changes its eyes green too). When you get the answer wrong, they shake their heads- MANOI looks really scary doing this so you don’t want to get the answer wrong. When you level up, they all do a crazy dance celebration.

You can grab their code on Github here!

Now for the next new part: when Impy (orange RoboBrrd) receives the data from the mesh, it communicates with the computer which is running a Processing application. In the application, it creates a tally of the questions answered, and the number correct, the enthusiasm value (which is just how drastic changes in RoboBrrd’s sensors were), and the “brain power”.

The brain power is determined by the function:
(correct/tries)+enthusiasm+(100*levelnumber)

This data is then uploaded to MyRobots every 15 seconds and then cleared out for the next upload batch.

One of the tricky parts was figuring out how to optimize the sending and receiving of packets on Impy (orange RoboBrrds) end. It turned out that we had to listen before we send, or something like that, just to make it work a bit more reliably.

You can grab the code for the Processing sketch on Github here.

Here’s the next new part: To have the results of the game displayed on a live scoreboard, we used the DFRobot RobotShop rover as a scoreboard. I attached it to the bottom of a soapdish, which gave the treads enough clearance, and some popsicle sticks for support. Marek added the numbers and faceplate to it, and coded it up in Python. The code pulled the live “correct” number score from MyRobots and then called the Arduino to update the motors accordingly. It was pretty sweet!

All in all, the whole system worked great. It’s truly the ultimate social robot network, because we were able to combine so many robots together!

There was a lot of stuff that we developed that we didn’t use or mention though. For instance, Marek created this web nodejs application that can show the same webpage to all clients, and also send tcp messages to everyone connected. CHECK IT OUT HERE! We were going to use this originally as a sort of orchestra or central command console for the robots. He also made a Twitter analyzing program that looks for happy faces or sad faces in the streaming Twitter firehose. The data is being plotted on his MyRobots page for it, which is really cool.

On the first day I worked on getting Learning Pet (blue RoboBrrd) going with the ADK. For some reason it would work fine, I would get up for a break, and then not work. So that night was the turning point in the hackathon when we went with the idea we have now.

The idea we implemented is pretty cool though, since it both sends data to MyRobots and it uses it. We also are using basically 3 clouds in the 1 project, being:
1. The math game web app
2. The local mesh network
3. MyRobots

All in all, it was a blast! Huge thanks to Marek for his web skills!

I’m definitely looking forward to volunteering at this hackathon next year. Thanks to the organizers for making such an awesome event. SEE YOU IN THE CLOUD!

Posted in: Fun, Programming, Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), Robot, WyoLum Progress.

Fun and Silkscreening

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, February 27th, 2012

Working on the board this week was a blast! It is really coming together, and things will start to ramp up pretty quickly. Here’s the back side of the board!

Check out the timelapse, this is probably the most action packed timelapse yet. It has good music too!

The problem with the path intersections from 2 weeks ago was solved by just drawing better. Usually I like to draw in Illustrator and mess around with it in Inkscape. Illustrator has better erasing, so I needed that for some of the drawings. Here’s the RoboBrrd drawing. I used the method ChangeSize(SelectedLines,+100,mils) in gEDA which makes it much easier and quicker to change the line width!

Here’s an example of messing around in Inkscape. Thanks for the pointers from Windell on the EMSL forums! I have no idea how I made it, but there was crosshatching and twisting involved, thanks to the eggbot Inkscape extensions. The cool part is that somehow I was able to combine and cut the two paths, wish I knew how I did this though! :p

I visited Spikenzie Labs last week and asked them some questions about the board! They suggested using a fill, so I tried it out. It gets rid of lots of unnecessary routes, which frees up some room for other things! They also described how to make some words shiny, which I have to try out

For the back of the board I was thinking it would be cool if it was sort of tartan, like a picknick of sorts. If the board is going to be red after the test boards, this would look pretty funky with white silkscreen!

The only problem is that sometimes with silkscreens that go over the solder pads, they interfere with the soldering, or the board house doesn’t like it, or nothing happens. So in general, assume the worst happens and now since there is silkscreen on the solder pads, then you can’t solder anything to it. This was pointed out to me by my Twitter friends, thanks everyone!

I printed out the boards on paper to test them out. gEDA was really great for this, export to ps, and then open it up in Preview and it gives you everything to print even with a Table of Contents.

For the printouts, Spikenzie Labs suggested to use foam underneath the paper to stop it from crinkling when you pressed in the parts. The idea worked great!

All of the parts fit through the holes without any issues.

But there was kind of a HUGE problem with the 7805. Originally I had it standing up, and if you wanted to put a shield on, well, you wouldn’t be able to.

The board is a bit longer than the current base of the Impy (orange) RoboBrrd.

There weren’t that many changes that had to be made…

So after the changes, this is what it looks like! The 7805 is laying down, and you’ll be able to attach it to the board. I moved the routes away from it incase it gets so hot and they get pulled up. Although in such a case, I think there would be more problems than just that Keep in mind this 7805 is just for the board- not for the servos. It won’t get too hot.

Now my fav part, the back of the board! There’s so much happening here. Along the digital pins there are clouds that are being pushed by the wind. The wind is moving some raindrops and swirlys onto a little fire down below. Next to that is a garden of flowers, and a sandbox of stars and swirlys. The music from RoboBrrd is traveling all around into the garden and beyond! And on the little nub is an infinity symbol and a flower and the OSHW logo. Can you guess what the infinity symbol and the flower represent?

There’s just some more cleaning up to do, and now I get to learn about gerbers. ….I didn’t really design with any DRUs, and whenever I try to run the test, X11 crashes… sooo I hope that my eyes will be good enough. Once this is all checked, I can send them off to Dorkbot to have a few printed!

Which brings me to my next point! We have a mailbox now. Mailboxes are great, because wherever in the world you happen to be, your mailbox will be at one spot AND it’s a bit more SECURE! Yesss! No more stolen whatevers! No more soggy electronics waiting in the snow!

Making the board last week has been like a marathon. It’s going to be great to see these printed out, I’m so excited! More later, peace and robots everyone!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), WyoLum Progress.

Logomotionator

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

Logomotionator is an App for the FIRST Robotics Competition 2011 that I created during the build season while helping out Team 296: The Northern Knights! You can download it on iTunes for free.

Here is the description of Logomotionator:

Logomotionator provides a way for teams to organize and collect their ideas about strategy and scoring during the 2011 FIRST Robotics Competition season.

Features:
- Fabulous user interface design
- Track the scoring for the red and blue alliance
- Up to 5 tubes per peg will be counted (in case some are deflated)
- Record which teams were on the alliances, their minibot scores and penalties
- View your saved scores and email them
- Draw strategic plays on the game field in red and blue
- Easily access the usfirst.org website

The FIRST Robotics Competition is a fantastic way to get youth interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math. Check out one of the regional competitions in your area to see what the future holds.

Inspiration for the App came about by the temptation of an Apple eMate 300 (an iPad of 10 years ago, basically)! I took in some feature requests and just started to work away at it. Making the calculator algorithm was fun

All of the coding was straight forward. I must be getting really good at making Apps or something. Making the game field drawing stuff was probably the part I most enjoyed:

I also really enjoyed the email stuff too:

The only rough spot was on the saved scores view, because the “Remove button” is actually in a different section, I have to replace it with an invisible cell when removing everything because of the protective UITableView cell math.

Once all of the functionality was there I wanted to make something that would really capture the energy that the competitions have. I figured it would have to look snazzy, so I paid close attention to detail when styling the App. On the iPhone 4′s retina display, the graphics look beautiful.

This is what the background looks like, I had a lot of fun making it!

This is my most complete App ever (so far). I really like the finished product. I can’t wait until after the season is over to go through some of the code with the programming students. It would be a fun exercise to break down the calculator algorithm!

I hope you enjoy it. There’s some more screenshots on flickr. Go download Logomotionator now! It’s free!

FIRST®, FIRST® Robotics Competition, FRC®, FIRST® Tech Challenge, and FTC®, are registered trademarks of FIRST® (www.usfirst.org) which is not overseeing, involved with, or responsible for this activity, product, or service.

Posted in: Art, FIRST, iPhone, Programming, Projects.

All Coding Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Woohoo! I fixed my soldering iron – it’s FANTABULOUS now! All I did was file it with an Xacto, and sanded it a bit. Now I can finally tin the tip (before I couldn’t) ^_^ It’s amazing!

My two WiiChuck adapters are finished – I tried to make it work this afternoon, but for some reason the WiiChuck header file by Tom Igoe isn’t working!!! :S I’m confused… maybe it’s because I’m using Arduino 0012. I’ll be playing around with it more tonight.

The WaveShield is all soldered up I’m thinking about which song I should put on my SD card to test it out… hmmm

There’s so many fun things to do eeeeee all of them are now at the coding stage yay!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.