Friday Night Robotics – Feb. 27ths

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, February 27th, 2009

In all actuality, Feb.27th was quite a while ago!

Friday was a pretty funny day. In the morning, it looked super beautiful because of how blue the sky was! The tree branches really stood out on the sky, and it looked really interesting.

Turned out though, as the day progressed… I remember walking to ARC and it was raining out. No problem there! I always enjoy looking at people who think that they are going to melt because of rain… Then after I leave the ARC there’s like 10cm of snow on the ground! Hahaha

A few days previous to this FNR, one of those bendy lamps broke. It was placed by the trash and looked very sad and lonely! I rescued it, deciding to make a robot for ARC.

Here is a video of the final product!

At first it was pretty tricky to decide where the servos would be placed. I chose a few random points and decided to go with that. After trying a proof-of-concept servo mockup, it turns out that those DOFs would not work because the bendy part was not bendy enough.

Instead, I mounted the servos at the top of the lamp. There’s only two DOF, however when you have only 2 DOF, you always have a very large window of opportunities. The best part of 2 DOF is when it looks comparable to a human nod (yes) or shake (no) of the head.

This part is the no (left/right) DOF

It is mounted securely with oodles of hot glue. However, in the video it shows that servo before the servo horns were attached together with hot glue. (Hence why it fell off- in the video)

This is the servo horn for the top part – backwards/forwards to create a ‘yes’ effect. I had to sand it down a bit to make the horn parallel to the lamp surface. It often popped off when it started to move, so that’s why there are popsicle sticks. They attach to the inside of the lamp.

So all in all, here are the servos mounted on the lamp! Cool eh?

The lamp is held down with a relatively massy mass. I think it has sand in it. It works very well!

There were times in this FNR where I was just waiting for glue to dry, so I also did some other stuff! I looked up this lil’ guy and how to make him work (notice how I just gave an electronic component a gender, but I can’t bare to give a gender to a robot… weird ) Turns out, I need a breakout board with lots of diodes and stuff. Blerg! Hahahaha. He is once more going back into the “stuff to do when…” box.

There was also this thingy- it is 2×4 orangey-red lights. I think it can be used for the lamp robot… like have the robot listen to 8 questions, and each of the lights lights up when a question is asked. Hahaha! I am concerned though that these are lamps because they are really really really hot when I put 5V (from the Arduino) into them.

I also wired up these LEDs… they all work, and are very prettyyyy!

The other thing that I did was I posted up the rules for RICC, the webpage of RICC, the webpage of RoboGames, and the Events page of RoboGames. I don’t think that the ARC will participate in RoboGames. RICC would be a very possible “maybe”. See, I am not the leader of the ARC – I don’t have control.

This last picture is just a nice picture I took of wires…

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

FNR BubbleBoy Lamp Video

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 26th, 2009

Here is the video of BubbleBoy reacting to the lamp turning on!

It is also on youtube.

The “squeaking” that you hear was one of the servos pulsating, most likely due to a short. I unplugged it later, and it stopped.

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.