Make: Lego and Arduino Projects Foreword

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, December 30th, 2012

Have you seen this book: Make: Lego and Arduino Projects? It’s all about adding in Arduinos to your Lego robot projects! This is really helpful if you find you want to do more with Lego robots, but find the NXT too restrictive.

It’s written by John Baichtal (@johnbaichtal), Matthew Beckler (@mbeckler) & Adam Wolf (@adamwwolf)! I’ve met these people at Maker Faire before, they are really cool. They asked me to write the foreword for their book, what a great honour!

This book goes along with the Bricktronics shield for Arduino. It’s how you can connect the NXT motors and sensors to the Arduino. They sent me one, cause even though I don’t have some Lego anymore, I’ll probably use the L293D for something (can never have enough of those chips eh!)

Here is a closeup of the board, not a lot of empty space and the TIP120′s will be standing up:

Here is the board when it is assembled. When following their kit instructions, the steps aren’t ordered from shortest components to tallest, so you may want to jump around a bit.

Look at this, the plastic connector things make it look like a giant compared to the Arduino / Diavolino!

CONNECTOR THINGS ARE STARING AT YOU!

Back in the day of RCX’s, the ‘connectors’ were much simpler and didn’t cost as much, they were just a few wires attached to a custom Lego brick. It was a lot easier back then to wire up your own lights or whatever.

I’m looking forward to using the L293D in some project at some point in time. As for the rest of the board, perhaps use it as robot artwork or something. Or if I find someone that is in to Arduinos and Legos, give it to them

Thanks again to the authours for the invite to write the Foreword. I hope it will get the readers motivated and ready to build (and read)!

More to come later about the latest and greatest RoboBrrd news!

Posted in: Fun, Maker Faire, News.

RoboBrrd at Maker Camp!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 12th, 2012

RoboBrrd will be at Maker Camp on Tinkering Tuesday! August 14th at 12PM PT / 3PM ET!

At this Maker Camp hangout, you will learn all about RoboBrrd! It is an open ended project, as there are many ways to create your own RoboBrrd! We will discuss programming an Arduino and getting the servos moving, and move differently when there are sensors involved. Additionally, we will show off the various RoboBrrds and detail how they were built and what improvements there were from robot to robot!

We will be watching the hashtag #MakerCamp on Google+ for *your* RoboBrrd creations on Tuesday! We hope to see your imaginative and awesome creations!

There’s some great content over on RoboBrrd.com/MakerCamp, and we will be adding even more on Monday! Here are two of the videos, supplies and ideas! We will also have a special Google+ Hangout Extension on Tuesday especially for RoboBrrd, so stay tuned

Hope to see everyone there on Tuesday! Learn all about RoboBrrd! ^_^ Check out RoboBrrd.com/MakerCamp for more info, and circle +Erin RobotGrrl on Google+ (and +RoboBrrd!)

Posted in: MAKE: Projects, Maker Faire, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RobotGrrl Interview with Robots-Dreams

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 30th, 2012

While at RoboGames I had the opportunity to meet Lem from Robots-Dreams! I’ve been a big fan of that site for a while, so it was quite the pleasure when Lem asked if he could interview me.

Here’s the interview, it’s 14 minutes long, it was really fun to do!

The interview ended up getting a lot of blog love! It was posted up on the MAKE blog, Arduino blog, and Adafruit blog.

Wow! This was pretty crazy in a good way, so thanks guys! The video is getting close to 10,000 views!

More blog posts are in the pipeline, so keep your robo-eyes peeled!

Posted in: Fun.

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 Documentation!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

The written documentation for how to build a RoboBrrd is on Make Projects! I had to get it done for the Make Bots with Character contest, competition is always a really powerful motivator for me.

I put a huge effort into the drawings to get them done before the deadline (drew each image myself). Here’s one of my favourite drawings from the bunch:

I was fortunate enough to have some good weather and tulips to take some decent photos of RoboBrrd:

Also created a summary video of RoboBrrd’s behaviours:

Considering how bad shape RoboBrrd was ONE week ago, it is amazing that it has come this far and this short amount of time. Last week there were problems with the LEDs, the communication between the boards, sometimes the motors didn’t work, the beak was loose, it was a big mess. Trying to fix the LEDs turned out being a huge ordeal.

The contest feels like it can go either way. I mainly want to spread the word about RoboBrrd, and being in the real Make magazine would accomplish that. I think RoboBrrd could inspire a lot of youth to take a stab at DIY robotics, instead of from kits and with stuff that they don’t have around their house (everyone has popsicle sticks and pencils, RoboBrrd is really accessible). It would be nice to see a flock of RoboBrrds at a Maker Faire one day MWUHAHAHA!

RoboBrrd was shown on Ask an Engineer last night! It was really cool, I’m uber humbled

All that is left now for RoboBrrd is more video tutorials and documentation! I’m going to challenge myself to get them all done this week, it will be interesting to see if I can accomplish the challenge! :O

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RoboBrrd is on the Mesh Network!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, May 9th, 2011

This is just a quick few sentences update to say that RoboBrrd is successfully on my robot mesh network! WOOHOO!

Had some horrible interrupt bugs that were resolved by switching out the main controller board (Arduino Diecimila 328) with an Arduino MEGA.

The communication board is spread out all over RoboBrrd’s back flap, I’m going to solder up the proto screw shield that was designated for RoboBrrd #2 and use it with this RoboBrrd #1 anyway. Since I have accidentally destroyed many servos with RoboBrrd #1, the possibility of a second RoboBrrd might not be realized.

Hopefully I will be able to show you this in action with a short video (unrelated to the tutorial series) tomorrow! The idea is to show RoboBrrd reacting to the PIR sensor, sending a command to the mesh network, and MANOI will be reacting to the command.

I posted some of the code and resources on Github. You can look at it, but please know that I’m going to improve it and make it a lot easier for everyone to use a little later on.

Next few days are going to be crazy, since I need to get RoboBrrd going to enter it into the MAKE robot competition. So much documentation of the design, circuits, and code has to be done!

BTW, I was selected for the WWDC Student Scholarship! Really excited

More details later!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Ottawa Mini Maker Faire!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

The Ottawa Mini Maker Faire was super cool! The previous Maker Faire that I was invited to go to was in San Fransisco, but I was in a car accident and it would have been unwise to actually go. This is why I was looking forward to the Ottawa one so much! It was a hit! There were tons of people to talk to, with lots of cool exhibits and stuff. About 500 people visited throughout the course of the two days! It was a fantastic turnout, for a “mini” Faire!

For my table, I brought MANOI and Yoda Bot, and all the tools necessary to make repairs if they were needed. MANOI was going to play hockey, and Yoda was going to pass the ball to MANOI. What really happened was MANOI ended up doing dance moves every three seconds, and Yoda Bot moved back and forth a bit while conserving battery life. People really seemed to enjoy MANOI and Yoda Bot though!

The most common questions that I received were…

1. What does MANOI do?
2. Is that a camera on MANOI’s headband?
3. What does Yoda Bot do?
4. What powers MANOI?
5. I saw MANOI on Daily Planet! Right?
6. Are you affiliated with any institution?

Pretty cool questions that were fun to answer. I really enjoyed explaining how MANOI’s hockey stick works, as well as the wireless link back to the computer. People were impressed with the smooth motions that MANOI had, too. A lot of people thought I was going to MIT for some reason… The most in depth question that I got involved the robot mesh network idea and SLAM. Actually, I think that question was from Carlitos so check out his blog at Carlitos Contraptions!

There was a lot of reprap action at the Mini Maker Faire. There were so many MakerBots it was an army! It was interesting to see them up close in person. They really are interesting tools that do a precise job of making things. Many people only print stuff in black and white though, which is kind of boring. There’s a reprap loaner program that I might be doing with Foulab. I’m misty about how it works in the details, but essentially I will be able to either print or make a new reprap from the old one, and I document and make a Bill of Materials covering how I made it.

The other robots at the Mini Maker Faire were pretty interesting. There was a ping-pong ball robot that had a complex mechanical loading system. There were LED indicators too to tell it where it was in the process of firing ping pong balls at you!

There were the tiny sumo robots too. One of them played the first few bars of “I’m a Barbie Girl” in MIDI tones. There was another robot that could move its wheels to be on a 45 degree angle, that way it could spin in circles. There was also another robot that looked like it was made from a Vex kit, which was pretty cool.

There was a boat robot from one of the university’s clubs. It used OpenCV to detect a red buoy and fire off its propellors accordingly. Water and electronics is a super challenge, it was pretty nifty to see some people doing that!

All of the people were really nice. it was like a science fair but without the judges, so people were there to genuinely learn about the hobbies and projects that local Canadians were up to! It was a blast, really. I am really interested in seeing what changes in the various projects next year! The rumours going around are that there’s going to be a Maker Faire in Toronto and Vancouver sometime next year!

Thanks a bunch to the organizers and volunteers for the Ottawa Mini Maker Faire!

Posted in: Other, Projects.