YELLING ROBOT!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Yelling Robot is a FREE Mac App that is an animated robot avatar which yells at you at regular time intervals!

The “yelling” capability is done through Mac OS’ speech synthesis Text-To-Speech (TTS) engine. It uses the “Zarvox” voice, since it is a robot.

It has a Questionaire for you to fill out, so that it can yell personalized phrases at you. It is almost like a “Mad Libs” activity, except that it actually says it out-loud through Mac’s TTS capabilities and you don’t see the complete phrases.

It is the most simplistic behavioural “robot” that you can get.

Please DOWNLOAD Yelling Robot and check it out. Leave a rating too!

I will have a video up soon, as I accidentally maxed out my Vimeo data with the BubbleBoy video, haha.

This was a quirky little Mac App that I created to share on the App Store when it is first opening. It is a fantastic day for the Mac OS, and software in general!

Happy Mac App Store Day!

DOWNLOAD YELLING ROBOT

Posted in: Animation, Art, Projects, Robot.

Robot Operating System – turtlesim

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, March 22nd, 2010

The Robot Operating System is a Free and Open Source software bundle of amazing libraries that can be used with your robot. There are oodles of libraries– OpenCV, Wiimote, iRobotCreate (!!! WOOT), NAO robots… and many more.

Installing the ROS has been an interesting process for me. I started with my Mac, which didn’t work (at first), then went to my Ubuntu 7 machine, killed it… Tried again on my Mac, followed everything down to the error that “file is not of required architecture) … Then I had Ubuntu 9 installed, installed ROS… posted a question about a “bug” (more of a misunderstanding on my end ) on the mailing list… and BAM! IT WORKS!

So, all in all:

• Haven’t made ROS work on a Mac yet
• You need to run roscore to initialize the ROS nodes
• This is awesome.

More later!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

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.