apps4arduino – Meters for Arduino on iOS, Introducing Wijourno!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011

Meters for Arduino is now available for iOS! You can get it on the App Store here:
http://itunes.com/apps/metersforarduino

It communicates with Meters for Arduino on Mac, which just had a 1.1 update. You can get it on the Mac App Store here:
http://itunes.com/mac/metersforarduino

Meters for Arduino on iOS works with the magic of Wijourno. Wijourno lets you communicate with your iOS devices and your Mac.

It’s a lot of fun, since you can send messages to specific devices, or broadcast a message to all devices. I’m imagining things where (for robots) you could have the iPad displaying lots of diagnostics and such, the iPhone would be the controller, and the Mac would be the data logger and connection to the internet!

Check out the apps4arduino site for more information, including some details on how you can use Wijourno in your own Apps. Can’t wait to see what people are going to make with this!

Posted in: apps4arduino, Programming, Projects.

World’s Maker Faire NYC 2011!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Maker Faire NYC was great! We showed off four of my robots, Learning Pet, DOGCOW, RoboBrrd, and MANOI!

We were located at the Robot Square which turned out to be a really great location!

By far the most popular was RoboBrrd Food! It was so crazy. The kids kept feeding the RoboBrrd constantly, they wouldn’t stop! And if they had to stop, sometimes they would start to cry or whine to their parents. It was great! It was funny to see how the younger kids understood what to do right away, when the older ones didn’t really know. As for the adults, you had to tell them to try feeding the RoboBrrd, they never did it automatically haha! Here is a video of RoboBrrd food in action, thanks to VayaConQueso!

You can learn more about RoboBrrd Food by reading the blog post, watching the video and looking at the source code!

Learning Pet was a close second to the most favourite robot. It was great to see everyone interacting with it. Some of the kids played right through from level 1 to 5, so they could see the super duper Learning Pet victory dance celebration!

Here’s a video explaining Learning Pet thanks to the NY Hall of Science:

You can learn more about Learning Pet in my Open Hardware Summit blog post, through this video, and on its website!

As for MANOI the hockey playing humanoid robot, most of the time its battery was running out! So lame! MANOI was always pretty much sitting down, like in this photo:

However, MANOI did appear at the 0:21 mark in the Engadget show. It was pretty crazy when they were filming, they were super professional, and no one knew they were from Engadget!

You can watch the Engadget show here!

To learn more about hockey MANOI, you can explore the MANOI tag and watch this video!

One of the favourite things was explaining everything to all the people. It’s fun to see their reactions and what they think of the projects. Plus, since there are so many people, what you say each time becomes more fine tuned!

Meeting people at the Maker Faire is great! Here is me with lots of Propeller boards with Jessica from the Parallax videos!

Check out all of the stuff that I brought home! I’m super excited to use all of this!

Some notables include:
- Tons of XBees YAY
- seeedstudio ADK kit WOOT
- Parallax!!!!!
- netduino, pulse sensor, white lol shield, shapelock, tshirt (bought these )
- Maker Passport (a repurposed Hackerspace passport) with lots of cool signatures in it! AWESOME!

I also managed to see Arc Attack for the first time in person ever! It is super cool, definitely recommend it! The sound seems so much clearer than anything else. The blue shining in from the glass was really amazing too, and all of the waves in the wall. I waited in line with a friend from university, Matt Krass, and his friends so it was pretty awesome. (I then forgot to say bye as I left, DOH! Was in a rush to get back to my robots!)

At the end of the Maker Faire, there were these blue ribbons being given out, and everyone I asked had no idea what they were. I asked the guy giving them out, and he said that they are *only* for awesome projects. To be honest, I got a little upset at this (my projects aren’t awesome?! whaaat?!), but he was kind enough to visit my table and hear me explain all my projects!

Here’s a video of me explaining ALL of the robots thanks to Chris Connors:

And then after that, he awarded me his very last Maker Faire Editors Choice award! Wow! Yay! Thanks again, Chris!

The trek back home was interesting! My parents drove down to bring me back. The fog in the Adirondacks at night is intense! We slept in a Walmart parking lot too I was super tired the whole time, falling asleep a lot.

Afterwards, my robots were featured on MAKE! What a super honour! Gareth is a pretty cool person, next Maker Faire we are definitely going to make some BEAM robots!

There were some people that I didn’t get a chance to meet, hopefully next time there will be that chance! Special thanks to Jonah and Katherine for letting me sleep on their (very nice) couch for OHS and Maker Faire! Thanks to everyone who made the Maker Faire NYC 2011 so much fun! It was a pleasure meeting everyone who came by the table, and hope to see you all next year!

Posted in: Fun.

RoboBrrd Food – Using the Redpark Serial Cable

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, July 21st, 2011

Remember a while ago, when I was able to send data through the MFi SkyWire cable? It turns out, now there is a cable designed for hobbyists, with an SDK, by Redpark! They were very kind enough to send me a cable, so I figured that the first thing to try would be to feed RoboBrrd!

Here is a video where I explain everything in detail!

View video on YouTube

Here is a link to the code on Github!

What is next? For WWDC 2011 legacy sake, I will probably try to drive DOGCOW robot with the iPhone’s accelerometer. This time though, the cable would be attached to an XBee so that it will be wireless.

Posted in: iPhone, Programming, Projects, Robot.

Dogcow + iPad

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, June 14th, 2011

Dogcow now works with the iPad without the use for a middleman in between! It goes straight from the App to the XBee for Dogcow to receive.

Here is a video explanation:

Or view the video on YouTube.

The process begins with an App using the ExternalAccessory framework:

Then goes through the SkyWire cable:

RS232 is converted to TTL:

Which is then sent through the XBee:

The XBee is powered by 3.3V, using an Arduino as a simple power supply haha:

And Dogcow receives with the XBee:

Making this whole process really cool!

Here are some resources that may be helpful:

• ExternalAccessory framework
• EADemo Code
• SkyWIre 30 pin to RS232 cable
• Sparkfun RS232 to TTL
• More photos on Flickr
• Also FYI, the baud rate is 9600 on the SkyWire cable

Also, as per Technote #31:

Dogcows, by their nature, are not all dog, nor are they all cow, but they are a special genetic hybrid. They are rarely seen in the wild. Since dogcows are two dimensional, they will stand facing a viewer “on edge” to avoid being seen.

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Canada Spirit!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Canada Spirit is now available on the App Store! Woot! It is a Free App, with an optional In-App upgrade. You can check it out here:

US: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8
Canada: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/canada-spirit/id394637853?mt=8

The App has actually been complete for 3 months now, but there were complications along the way. It’s a long story:

For Apps that use In-App purchases, you have to have your App reviewed (without the In-App purchase capabilities) and rejected. This takes approximately 1.5 weeks. Not to mention, that you have to make the App without the In-App capabilities, which, depending on the complexity and time dedication, could be a few days. We’re already looking at 2 weeks waiting here.

Once your App is rejected, you can finally test the In-App purchase sandbox part of your App. SWEET. Add a few days for debugging. We’re up to a total of about 2.5 weeks used to be waiting here.

This is when the crazy part happened to me. For the In-App purchase, I selected the option “Canadian English” for the language. When my App moved to “In Review” (yesss finally!), they removed that language, which forced my In-App purchase to be in a “Developer Action Required” state- and thus no In-App Purchase approval. The whole point of submitting your App (without the In-App purchase capability) to be rejected was to get the In-App purchase approved.

For this, an additional 1.5 weeks were added. We’re already at 4 weeks here! >_<

Depending on how carefully you read the guidelines for the App Store, then you can be waiting about a month. That’s what happened to Canada Spirit. It got caught in the payment for hardware devices clause. This added another 1.5 weeks…

Once the App was resubmitted, the In-App purchase language options changed AGAIN. Luckily though this time the App Store review team actually contacted me and I was able to fix the In-App without having to go to the back of the line. YAY!

You have to have a lot of dedication to survive the App Store review process. Canada Spirit went through 6 weeks of poking and prodding just to get to you guys, so I hope you enjoy it Post your screenshots of whatever photos you decorate on Flickr so that we can see them!

Also, sharing this story isn’t meant to be against the App Store at all. I still enjoy the App Store as a consumer and developer! It is to cast some awareness on the time investment you will have to make if you want to do some In-App purchases!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

S7GraphView Zoom & Pan Code

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

Here is the code for the S7GraphView Zoom & Pan modification that I mentioned a while ago for the s7graphview iOS framework.

DemoS7GraphView-ZoomPan.zip

If anyone out there improves it more, please leave a comment!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.

Movable Graph – s7graphview

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 6th, 2010

One of the pitfalls of core-plot is that it is hideous to try to interact with. Panning back and forth on the graph slows to a crawl. Zooming requires scaling down the whole graph, and is probably over-complicating the process. Plus, you can’t really add a title to the graph. In HS the teachers purposely take off “5 points” if you don’t have a title to the graph! I really want to do a good deed and help improve the graphing on iOS devices.

The s7graphview framework is really lightweight and does what it has to. Only problem is that it can’t pan or zoom. I took a look at the code and managed to move variables around to the right places to make it work. Check out the video:

You can see a few bugs though, especially with the axis lines. Once those are fixed, I’ll be using this new graph framework in KiloWhatt and then releasing the updated graphing framework open source! With some sample code for iPad and iPhone too.

Hopefully this will make graphing on iOS easier for everyone. In a couple of weeks I can’t wait to see more graphs!

Posted in: iPhone, Projects.