Friday Night Robotics – Arduino a la Soapbox

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 10th, 2009

I was always looking for a good place to put Arduinos in. Those black boxes you get from electronic stores were always too heavy and not colourful enough… finally, VOILA! It appears before my eyes…

A SOAPBOX!

How awesome is that? At Kinney’s they come in several different colours:

• Lime green
• Dark green
• Purple
• White
• Blue
• Pink

The lime green is by far the best one.

This is what it looks like on MANOI!

Inside, is an Arduino MEGA!

The only tricky part for the MEGA was that I had to make a hole for the USB cable:

The plastic isn’t the easiest to cut, but it is easy if you have patience. I don’t have patience much, so I sliced my finger with an XActo a bit. It’s not too bad though, and it is an excuse to wear Spongebob bandaids. If you know you can’t do it, I would strongly suggest you get someone that knows how to do it. Otherwise you will hurt yourself

This is sooo cool though!

Wave Shield a la Soapbox:

Ethernet Shield a la Soapbox:

Arduino Diecimila a la Soapbox:

Sanguino a la Soapbox (needs to be cut to fit):

Boarduino a la Soapbox (could probably fit 4 of these in there):

Phewephewphhpweh! The soapboxes only cost $1.49 each.

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This entire week I was constantly debugging MANOI in order to get it to play hockey again. Midweek my friend lent me her Chinese super glue. I glued myself to the super glue… so I bought some Krazy glue (witht he brush) and some Elmers glue.

I also found some snaps at Walmart which help incredibly to snap on the hockey stick to the hand.

My process was just constantly layering on more and more glue. Once the Elmers dried, I would add more Krazy glue. Once the Krazy dried, more Elmers… etc etc. The goal was to get it working for Saturday morning (the Tech Tent).

Everything did work by then, but it was quite a journey!

Now I am trying to find a way to have MANOI express its feelings (without movements). I was trying to do something along the lines of antennas. Take a look:

I’m not entirely sure though… I mean, doesn’t it look kind of weird?!?!?! It’s more scary than social!

From this angle it doesn’t look too bad:

Does anyone have any ideas/thoughts/comments?

I have also been working on getting my Arduino MEGA multi-cored by connecting with other Arduinos. Basically, the MEGA will only be controlling the servos and the other Arduinos. The other Arduinos would be controlling the LEDs, music, ethernet, you name it.

The thought came to me today that I also can make it so that the MEGA is wireless and communicates to the SSC-32 wirelessly (through an XBee). I am so excited I don’t know what to do first!!!

In the middle of the week I am going to make a blog post about the Nunchuck code People will probably find it handy.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

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.

Hockey MANOI + Wii Nunchuck

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Today (Thursday) I got my MANOI working with my Wii nunchuck!

It was super easy since I already had the configuration ready because of my other robot.

Here are some pictures:

The SSC-32 is barely visible anymore!

The big transformer powers the battery to give it 12-13V (constantly). The small transformer is for the Arduino, cause I couldn’t find a 9V battery

MANOI’s Leg

MANOI

MANOI’s back- the battery and Arduino are attached to tape using velcro

The way it works is the Wii nunchuck has an i2dc interface with the Wave Shield, which is on the Arduino. Using the Nunchuck library, you know what button is being pressed and values of the accelerometer.

I already made functions to determine if the nunchuck is tilted home, left/right or up/down. Soooo, I just added the “skating” functions to that, and the condition that the C button has to be pressed. There’s more control this way.

To shoot, it’s just the Z button.

The most surprising part of all of this was when I realized that MANOI “skates” better when I added all the stuff to his back. I guess it adjusted the center of gravity just right!

There’s a video here:

I still have some more stuff to do… like add a few more motions and sound.

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, November 8th, 2008

Yay!! Tonight I worked on my new/old robot… It’s the robot with the chassis of the Stanley robot that I started making at Stanford in the summer. It has a gerabox to power two motors for front wheel drive, plus there’s a servo to “steer” the gearbox.

The cool part is that I use a Wii nunchuck to control the robot Tonight I coded in which way is which- tilted to the left/front/back/right. The tilt to the back doesn’t work very often, so I have to fix it

By this point, you’re probably wondering where the pictures are =) I can’t upload photos with this version of wordpress (and I’m too sleepy to ftp them right now), but I’ll add them in tomorrow as I’m changing my blog to WordPress 2.7 tomorrow, with a new theme ^_^ I really really really like the new theme. It’s going to be awesome!

Posted in: Programming, 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.

Wii Nunchuck Controlled Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

This is what the article says:

I connected a Wii Nunchuck controller to an Arduino, which takes the data from the controller’s I2C data bus, decodes it, and send the data to the robot with a radio transmitter. Charlie uses a radio receiver to get the data, and it will control the drive servo system and the pan tilt servo system using the data. The Nunchuck has a 3 axis accelerometer, a joystick, and 2 buttons, it is absolutely awesome to use with a RC robot like this.

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I have a great idea… I’ll save up my allowance and buy another Arduino and buy a nunchuck wii controller, then put it into my MANOI, spiff up the program to make it walk, then I can have it walking everywhere! I wonder how tricky it would be to set up gyros… Haha! And when I program the two keys, it will be punches and kicks. Not that my MANOI would kick anyone… or would it? ;P

Link.

Posted in: News, Robot News.

Wii Nunchucks and Servos

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, October 26th, 2007

Check this out!
I blogged this in case I want to refer to it again ;D

Posted in: News, Robot News.