Friday Night Robotics – BubbleBoy’s “Melodies”

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, January 2nd, 2011

This FNR I added a speaker to BubbleBoy. I wanted to see how much better it would be to make a postulation as to how BubbleBoy is “feeling”, since it has “emotions”. Those words are used in quotes because they are represented in the code by single-layer perceptrons (without being trained), which really doesn’t do justice to the amount of processing needed to accomplish such tasks. This is just a trial to see if audible feedback will enhance the user’s experience of playing with BubbleBoy.

Here is a video of an explanation of what the user can see and hear:

BubbleBoy’s “Melodies” from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

You can download the code here!

Oh, and I streamed while making this.

Soooo, I challenge all of you who are reading this to add a speaker/sound to one of your projects. It doesn’t have to be fancy! Leave a comment if you do accomplish this challenge, I would like to see it

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

All Coding Ahead

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Woohoo! I fixed my soldering iron – it’s FANTABULOUS now! All I did was file it with an Xacto, and sanded it a bit. Now I can finally tin the tip (before I couldn’t) ^_^ It’s amazing!

My two WiiChuck adapters are finished – I tried to make it work this afternoon, but for some reason the WiiChuck header file by Tom Igoe isn’t working!!! :S I’m confused… maybe it’s because I’m using Arduino 0012. I’ll be playing around with it more tonight.

The WaveShield is all soldered up I’m thinking about which song I should put on my SD card to test it out… hmmm

There’s so many fun things to do eeeeee all of them are now at the coding stage yay!

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Put on your Sunday Clothes

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, August 24th, 2008

I actually bought the real Wall-E soundtrack, since I like it so much! It’s uber cool… it comes in a recycled material case

At first, I thought the movie was medium… it wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad. The whole dystopian/furturistic evolution of people as they became more dependent on technology really freaked me out. The hover chairs and BNL were the main sources of that. They should have taken better care of the planet- cans could have been recycled, along with all the other garbage.
One of the quotes that stands out in my mind is…

Auto: “On the Axiom, you will survive”
Captain: “I don’t want to survive, I want to live!”

But… everyone is really liking it – except for me!! WHYy? I think I figured it out…
If I didn’t know about dystopian societies, like in Handsmade Tale, 1984, Brave New World… then I wouldn’t have thought that it would be dystopian (which I automatically connect with BAD) but instead, futuristic.
If I wasn’t anticipating a cheesy ‘Hello Dave’ joke with Auto, I wouldn’t have been disappointed, ha.
If I didn’t know that creating robots with emotions as complex as in Eve & WALL-E, then I wouldn’t have taken a ‘that’s almost impossible’* attitude.
*it’s actually not too much ‘that’s almost impossible’, it would just need complex AI, even a form of general AI.

I could go on, but really the point is is that WALL-E is a really awesome movie if I didn’t know… . Now that I realize that, it is a pretty good movie I’m for sure buying the 3 DVD set.

The soundtrack is amazing too… everyone should spend the extra few dollars to buy it in real

Posted in: Animation News, News, Other News.