Impy RoboBrrd – All Photos on Flickr!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Vote for RoboBrrd in the laser cutter contest! ~( ^v^ )~

All of the photos that you see on the Instructable, and more, are now on Flickr!

So you can see what tools you need more clearly:

One of my favourite things about this RoboBrrd was how shiny it was on the insides:

Plus, the wiring is super tidy!

With the hula hoop on, this reminds me of something like a RoboBrrd peace sign…

Speaking of hula hoop, here are two capacitors that look like a happy face! They are placed on the two motor pins, going to ground.

The legs ran away! Hahahaha

Gluing the eyes on is super fun. It always amazes me how well the two materials, hot glue and googely eye, bond together. They are very sturdy.

You can see all of the steps for the RoboBrrd on the Instructable here. Please vote and ask your friends to vote for RoboBrrd in the laser cutter contest! It means a lot

One of the cool things about RoboBrrd is that it is so silly that anyone can like it, and anyone can learn a little bit more about robotics from it. For example, an often overlooked part of robotics- laying out the electronics and wiring so that everything fits nicely, without wasting too much space or not having enough space. With this RoboBrrd, we took this into consideration when designing the base, and tried to not waste any extra space, while still having enough room for maintenance and wires. Cool eh!

We’ll be posting more updates throughout the week, so stay posted!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

RoboBrrd Instructable and the race for a laser cutter!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 15th, 2011

Vote for RoboBrrd in the laser cutter contest! ~( ^v^ )~

Wooohoo! We have documented everything and made it so that you can now follow an Instructable to build your own RoboBrrd! Huzzah!

Here is a teaser for the new RoboBrrd, nicknamed Impy (short for Important).

Throughout the week we will be posting here some supplemental photos, videos, and CAD illustrations for the build of the RoboBrrd!

For example, the base! The base is covered in Step 5.

Here is a very clear way of seeing all of the craft sticks, highlighted with different colours to show the different parts.

We were able to make everything fit in a 16cmx14cm piece, including the battery and controller board. This is the bottom face to that base:

Add on a platform to that, and you will be able to have a place to mount the servos!

The base is 4cm tall, enough space for everything to fit, and for the rotational servo to poke out just a little bit.

Add on the top face, as you can see in the first CAD, and there you have the base!

Making this Instructable was quite a challenge, since there are many steps involved that have to be done in a set order. Hopefully you will find it exciting, and make your own RoboBrrd! They are quite a hoot!

If we do win the laser cutter, we will be able to zap out some pre-cut shapes for all of RoboBrrd’s faces. This would effectively cut down the construction time for the RoboBrrd immensely. With less construction time, this would be able to fit into a school’s lesson plan a lot easier- and there is a lot of things that can be learnt about robotics from building a RoboBrrd, like a voltage regulator circuit!

Share this with your friends, get your neighbour to vote even. Let’s get more people excited about robotics!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Refinement for Mini RoboBrrd (Learning Pet)

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

There are some things with Mini RoboBrrd (Learning Pet) and the original RoboBrrd that still irk me.

Why do the mini servos keep breaking? For the original RoboBrrd, I probably went through 4 or so of these (can’t remember the original count). Sometimes the gears would just get stuck, other times it would still be able to move, but not controllable. Having a mass (the wing) extended from the arm was the probable cause- there’s no counterweight on the other side of the servo to balance it. I’m hoping that this will solve the problem!

The best part is that people have been contacting me about how they can implement RoboBrrd into their curriculum! I think it will be worthwhile to make another Mini RoboBrrd from scratch in order to make a clearer and more precise Instructable. While the Instructable would mainly be for them, and for other people, and for me remembering what I was doing, it can also win a laser cutter. The laser cutter would help me make parts for the RoboBrrd as a kit so they don’t have to use craft sticks- wouldn’t that be super cool? I LOVE TO DREAM!

Since I’m getting more familiar with the RoboBrrd construction, this time my approach to building it will be different. In advance, I’m going to create instructions with pictures rendered from CAD. Once these are refined enough, I can construct the actual Mini RoboBrrd from the same set of instructions that everyone will also be looking at.

Here are some changes that will need to for sure be done in the design:
- Bottom face will be made out of craft sticks (wider)
- Give all the wires headers (male) so they can easily plug into the protoshield
- Use dual lock in a square pattern to mount rotation servo to bottom face
- Add counter balance (a few pennys, or an american 5 cents piece) to wing servo arm
- Two LDRs (they weren’t in Learning Pet)
- Add ridge to side faces for neater wiring
- Diagonal support for wing (to make the shape more triangular)
- Battery powered
- Speaker
- Tiltball

This revision would be using a standard Arduino, and I’m hoping that perhaps the servos can be powered by a AA battery pack that can fit into the base of the RoboBrrd.

The change I’m looking forward to the most is the dual lock for the rotation servo. This will be exceptionally handy for debugging. You’ll be able to detach the entire RoboBrrd from its base! Dual lock is like velcro, but made out of plastic so it is more sturdy, and with less “wiggle” room.

OpenSCAD is nice for some things, but for mini RoboBrrd I want to eventually make an animation where all the parts fly into place (for fun). So, last night I spent 5 or so hours trying to learn AutoCAD 2012 for Mac. They give out the educational version for free, which is really nice! It takes a while to get used to. There’s also no good tutorials (I later found this site which is helpful)… so if you are trying to learn AutoCAD, I recommend to just press all the buttons and try and figure it out. I would also recommend to make everything in 3D, as you can always get a 2D wireframe in a different viewing mode. This troubled me at the beginning, but once I figured it out it got going pretty decently.

Here is the bottom face that I created!

I’m having issues with rendering though. I selected a nice wood texture that looks like the craft sticks, but it doesn’t render out well.

This grey mode is quite nice looking.

Once the CAD’ing part is done, and I get some more parts (thanks Adafruit!), then I can actually document the build really really well. I even have CFL lights instead of normal lights, which makes the desk even clearer. I’ll probably get some white poster board for the table so it is also more professional.

I’m wondering how I should video the build process. Have an overhead camera while I am working on it, record everything and edit later? Or after each step make a summary video clip of how it was done? Maybe a combination of both, resulting in lots of GB and lots of editing?

Let me know if you have any ideas on how to improve Mini RoboBrrd more. This would be the time to give feedback so that I can possibly use it in the design!

I’ve also been working insanely on an interesting new addition to apps4arduino. It’s really exciting, and I can’t wait to share it with everyone.

Also on Saturday I performed a brain transplant on MANOI and replaced the old Arduino MEGA with a seeedstudio ADK and an Arduino MEGA Protoshield to keep the wires more organized. Haven’t tested it yet, maybe once I finish the CAD!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Friday Night Robotics – CMUcam2

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

The CMUcam2 is a really cool camera for robotics made by CMU. The version that we’re using for this Matlab project (that I mentioned before) was actually used in FIRST competitions a long time ago.

The first problem we faced with this was that it requires 7.2V, in a range of 5.2V – 8.6V. What gives 7.2V?! Crazy! If you take 6 AA rechargeable batteries together, they can add up to be 7.2V exactly. (1.2V * 6 = 7.2V). Battery packs naturally don’t come in sixes, so I ended up making one:

This was actually my first time making a series battery pack. It’s in series because we want to use Ohm’s law, where the voltage is added together. Thanks to the people in the Fat Man and Circuit Girl IRC chat room, they helped me figure it out. Here’s a drawing that I made incase others too need help with this someday. Basically, connect the positive to negative over and over again! ^_^

The next step is to get the camera working. This is by far the hardest part. There’s numerous methods of communicating to the CMUcam2, all of which use RS232. Arduinos also use RS232, so at least we’re in known territory.

The CMUcam2 has a serial port, a TX/RX/Gnd line, and a TTL port. On my Mac, I tried the serial port, it didn’t work. I tried the TX/RX/Gnd line into an Arduino, it also didn’t work. I also tried to use the TTL, but it also didn’t work. I’m not really sure why nothing works on my Mac, especially since the camera works with a PC just fine.

This is where I’m at right now. No idea what to do to make the CMUcam2 work on my Mac. Do any of my blog readers have any ideas?

WOOT~~~ TWIST ENDING!! READ ON!!!

I was thinking that it would be really lame to end the blog post without some sort of screenshot of Matlab or something. So I gave the CMUcam2 another shot… I made it work!!! IT WORKS!!! IT WORKS ON MY MAC!!!!!! =) The code that I was using to test the camera is from Instructables.

So, now that it works we have things to do… like figuring out how we can get the RGB data for each pixel, and then saving that to an image. After its in an image, we can do some form of edge detection. Matlab probably has a toolbox for that. More fun later!

Google thinks that you might like this:

Posted in: Programming, Projects, School.