Friday Night Robotics – Gyro in MANOI’s Back

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 11th, 2010

Friday, June 11th, I originally wanted to work on BubbleBoy and the swashplate, but it seems as though the axels that I bought ages ago were too big. They could only fit in the big servos, but BubbleBoy uses micro servos.

MANOI’s gyro and accelerometer were in need of being more securely mounted, and the area in MANOI’s back is a great place to mount them. You can hardly see them, but the gyro is mounted on the right wall, and the accelerometer is mounted on the back wall. There’s a piece of foam in there to protect them, and keep them more secure.

The Serial Servo Controller (SSC-32) is what is mounted on top of these, and it was previously only attached to MANOI by velcro. Now there’s some wire tied through its waist and through the SSC-32 to hold it in place!

That was about it for that Friday. The readings from the accelerometer and gyro are definitely less jumpy, and MANOI’s center of gravity is moving around less now.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Grabbing MANOI’s Accelerometer and Gyro Data

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Last FNR I embedded MANOI’s Accelerometer and Gyro into its back. Usually what people do first when they add these motion sensors is make their robot self balancing. For now, I’m going to see if I can do something a little cooler.

The idea stems from a Fast-Fourier Transform result for sound- where you can see the various volumes and such. (Check out my Processing Fancy FFT). What I’m aiming to create is a FFT for motion. Basically, if you move MANOI around, the algorithm will be able to detect a pattern and do stuff afterwards. Essentially what this is leading up to is an interesting dancing robot. =)

I’m starting off with a Processing program that will visualize and log the data (see above screenshot). I envision a split-view display with two cubes. One will be showing the live sensor input, the other will be showing the results of the pattern algorithm to the live data.

No idea yet how the algorithm will turn out. I’m probably going to start at a very basic level, and perhaps add complexities on later. It will be interesting to see how this will turn out!

Soon to be blogged…

• The FNR that I mentioned, but didn’t blog about
• RampageRobot!!!
• RoboGlyphs

Posted in: Programming, Projects.

MANOI’s Antennas and Tidying Up

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

One of the annoying things about MANOI is that there are many things that can break very often. The antennas broke very often, mainly at the plug part, where the wires plug into the Arduino, and thankfully not the difficult part, the leads to the LEDs. The wires connecting the LEDs to the Arduino were way too long and throwing off the center of gravity for the balance. Also, the leads for the LEDs were uncovered. This is not aesthetically pleasing, and it is unsafe.

First step was to remove the wires currently attached to the LED (these were red white green black wires), cut the new wires (red orange yellow brown) to a shorter length. Solder on the new wires, and use green shrink wrap. The green is important, since this colour matches MANOI’s colour scheme

When all four are done:

The terminals were where a lot of breaks occurred, so these had to be improved. The previous way this was handled was that I soldered the wires to pins on a 3 pin male header, then placed hot glue around the solder joints. This time, I used shrink wrap instead of the glue.

It makes sure that it is nice and sturdy. People can actually touch it now, and it won’t break!

The ground bus was also very messy the first time around. This was now fixed, and cannot be seen since it will be within MANOI’s head unit.

After positioning and hot gluing, it looks great!

The new antennas really go with the colour theme

Here you can see that the wires are much tidier.

And voila! MANOI looks much happier now.

As for the rest of tidying up… I made a quick battery caddy out of a watch tin to keep my batteries organized into charged or needs to be charged!

On MANOI’s other hand with the hockey stick is this adapter that sort of extends the hand from the servo a bit. I figured I might as well add it to the other hand as well. I also fixed the bows with the jingle bells and reattached them to MANOI’s wrists- that’s what the velcro is for in the below picture

Fixed MANOI’s hockey stick plug in adapter wires:

The next improvement was to the power switch that powers the servos. The switch keeps on breaking, so I wanted to redo it. Since I was redoing it, I figured I might as well use one of the switches that lights up! Since there’s three prongs, and one of them is a Ground, I wanted to be overly careful and make sure I test it first…

The switch works, lights up, and doesn’t blow up! It’s rated for 12V, and the battery is 11.1V. Hopefully there is enough wiggle room there. I’m pretty pleased with the way it looks and works in comparison to the broken switch.

That’s about all that has been accomplished this far. There’s still a lot more to do! On my workdesk now I have two ultrasonic sensors, a gyro and accelerometer, and many photoresistors (LDR). I want to somehow hook up the LDRs to MANOI and make a program where I can shine a light at them, and MANOI would move accordingly. Taking it a step further, I’d attach the light to a Wii Nunchuck where MANOI could number crunch and analyze the accelerations from the nunchuck to do something — maybe make a prediction about where the light will be going. It would sort of be like a game of Simon, only the “Simon” would be MANOI, and would be actively trying to outsmart you.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

MANOI-in-a-box

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Team 229 is heading to a FIRST competition this week- and since I don’t have three tests on one day I can actually go to this one! WOOHOO!

The location of this competition is one of the most awesome ones… APPARENTLY iRobot scouts people there. Meaning, they’re hunting for smart brains to hire during the summer. :XD: Even though I don’t roll with military style robots (they aren’t supposed to be sociable), that’s pretty cool, to be honest.

I figured that it would be awesome to carry MANOI around and just having it wave its arms, with a Team 229 flag (see picture above). I think some High Schoolers may enjoy that.

Transporting MANOI for the past few years has been a hassle… so we finally found a good box with styrofoam stuff in it! The styrofoam is actually really nicely engineered, because it comes cut into rectangles, which means that you can easily customize it. This is how MANOI fits in its new box:

There is room for MANOI’s basic needs in there- the batteries and charger, ping pong balls, USB cables… etc.

The outside needs more stickers, but I have the classic FRAGILE one, and a “Made with LabVIEW” sticker — even though it’s not even relatively made with LV. Hahahaha! I’m thinking of printing out a picture of an Arduino and taping it on there.

The other day, a member of CUARC with a dremel cut a hole in this metal box for me… Can you guess what is on the inside?

IT’S A MINTYBOOST! YAY!

This will provide MANOI’s microcontroller with the power that it needs while cheering on Team 229

I haven’t programmed the motions yet for MANOI, but I can do that in the hotel tonight. I’m thinking that the legs will be stationary, and just have the arms move around. Also thinking of using the Wii nunchuck to control which sensors are being read or something. I will indeed post the code when I make it! =)

Posted in: Art, MANOI, Projects, Robot.

MANOI dancing to Yankadi

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, March 6th, 2010

Near the beginning of the Spring 2010 semester, a small activities fair was hosted for various clubs at Clarkson University. Autonomous Robotics Club originally didn’t have a table, but the orchestra let us have a little piece of theirs… =) Coincidentally, it was right near the Yankadi (west African drumming) club!

MANOI was running the Holiday Xtravaganza program, which made it look like it was ringing its bells in tune to the music!!! It was a really interesting sight to see, music from a robot and music from a group interacting together!

Here is a short video of some clips (mainly focussing on MANOI) of the event:

Music is a form of nonverbal communication, says Captain Obvious. So, it would be really worthwhile in the future to research how robots and humans can interact together through music. Perhaps in some elder care homes, drumming in a group with their personal robot (pets) can be a possibility! Maybe it wouldn’t be as intense drumming as this– it could be playing on a balafon or something.

The current elder generation has been closely tied with music… the radio was really popular back then, TVs weren’t all that common yet. Introducing personal robots into this type of a scenario would make sense, it wouldn’t be too intimidating for the elders since they have been accustomed to music for a very long time.

Here are two more videos of MANOI and Yankadi:

Yankadi is really great music activity since it’s so creative and doesn’t require any rhythm at all (if you’re playing in a big group). Plus, the sound is amazing!

Art and technology!! ^_^

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot, School.