Friday Night Robotics – Plain Vanilla

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, January 18th, 2009

At first, the title of this post was “Mediocre at Best”, but after I typed it all up, I realized that I did do stuff that makes it a little bit better than mediocre! So, I switched it to “Plain Vanilla”. There really isn’t much stuff to do when I don’t have MANOI around!

I started a new project thingy where it is an extremely simple game of pong. The paddles are stationary, but the trick is that one paddle would be controlled by the computer (in this case- an Arduino), and the other would be controlled by the human with a Wii Nunchuck.

The paddles are represented by tiny pink LEDs, and the ball is represented by the LEDs in between them.

There is one LED at the top that is used to signal the start of a new game, and/or a goal.

Since the human player would be using a nunchuck, it would sort of be like Dance-Dance-Revolution where you would have to tilt it a particular way to have the paddle show up. For this, I’m going to use BubbleBoy’s LCD screen:

It will also be able to display the score! ^_^

I got a little bored of doing this due to numerous conflicting errors when I compiled the code, so I switched to my snowplow robot.

I remember having trouble trying to get the two motors to move with this one, so my main goal was to debug it. It turns out that one of the tab thingys on the DC motor was loose!

I had to snap the robot in half in order to transport it, so now the snowplow is waaay too top heavy =) It’s kind of funny!

I really can’t wait to get my Femsapien that I won from the Robots Podcast contest. I’ll play around with it a bit, then I will hack it and put an Arduino in it! One of the things I really want to do is to try making it Twitter. Since I don’t have an ethernet shield, I would probably have the robot (Arduino) send a variable to Processing, which would then twitter, probably using something like this.

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

LCD Kit Arrived!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, April 10th, 2008

A big huge thank you again to uC Hobby for sending me an LCD Kit! Now I can FINALLY use my LCD that I bought at a HAM radio thing.

I have a few problems with it… for instance, I don’t know what the pins on the right hand side are supposed to connect to. The 1-16 pins are pretty straightforward – but what on earth are those other ones for?!

Furthermore, I accidentally might have exploded the entire thing. I’m sleepy after school, so I reversed all the connections to 5V and Gnd. Ugh. The chip was so hot! I don’t think they’re designed to resist that amount of hotness. I hope I didn’t break it!

Here are some pictures

I hope I can figure it out today It’s not broken until it’s broken! I still have faith.
Thank you uC Hobby!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.