Posts Tagged ‘open source’
Hello Oshawatt!
You’ve heard that there is a special creature that lives in a foggy habitat rich with old electronics. After searching all night, the sun is rising and the fog starting to roll in more. From afar you see something waving. Are those arms? They’re really long for arms. As you move closer, you start to see its mouth and eyes, it’s smiling, and its eyes are fading in and out gently. It finally comes into view… aha! It is the creature, the Oshawatt robot!
Hello friend of Oshawatt!
I created a new robot last week in Inventor. It’s designed to sort of look like a sloth with really long arms, and also have the cute charm of the Pokemon Oshawott. It’s a cute open source robot. The arms have lots of degrees of freedom, the head can bob up and down, and the legs are able to swing. The expressive mouth can look like a cylon, happy, sad, surprised, and also mini-fangs.
I haven’t exactly built it yet, though SpikenzieLabs has laser cut it for me which is pretty sweet! Also going to use Adafruit’s servo controller (thanks Adafruit!) eventually for controlling all of the micro servos! I don’t have the money for all the servos and sensors that are needed for it, so it’s a good thing for it to be Open Source hardware right now!
The CAD files are Autodesk Inventor 2013, but the major assemblies have been transported into Autodesk 360 and embedded on the webpage so that everyone can view them, pan, zoom, and rotate the 3d models. It’s pretty cool! We also include standard .eps files with the pieces on them which can be opened in Inkscape.
It’s open source under the CERN OHL v1.1 license. There’s some details over on the Oshawatt page on RoboBrrd.com that would be good to read first, then you can check out the filez!
Here is a description of Oshawatt’s personality:
Like all cool robots, Oshawatt does have a personality that I imagine for its character. It’s the type of robot that wants a lot of sensory feedback, so it will be waving its arms like crazy, and then humans will interact with it, and then it won’t know what to do. When that happens, it becomes sort of shy and starts to bob its head and animate its mouth expressions. Of course, its eyes are an overall indicator of its mood (assuming they are rgb leds). Oh yeah, in case you didn’t guess, its favourite dance would definitely be YMCA, though it has trouble with the ‘M’ letter sometimes.
For more details and learning more about how the design was made and all of that, please check out Oshawatt’s web page! It even has the Autodesk 360 models on it, so you can spin them around.
All I ask is for a thanks and a smile 
Any donations are welcome and mega-appreciated to fund some more of my crazy robot character experiments!
Crossing my fingers that someone will make a Oshawatt robot! It would be so cool to see it up and running!
Plasma RoboGlyph! — Open source pcb art ^_^
RoboGlyphs are pieces of pcb artwork that are interesting to look at, and can be functional in some form! This is the Plasma RoboGlyph! It’s just a fun little project that I figured I would try out. I ordered these boards along with the RoboBrrd Brain Boards, since the shipping is quite a bit.
Here are the pics of the board!
Front:
Back:
Check out the timelapse of the making of the board!
Watch on YouTube
It was interesting to make this, a lot of the programs kept crashing so it required so much patience! I started off with this plasma image. It was just some random CC image I found on flickr that was really good.
This was then transformed using StippleGen 2.02 from Evil Mad Science! The parameters we ended up using were:
- 8,268 stipples
- 0.50 min. dot size
- 10.00 dot size range
Here’s a screenshot of it in paused mode:
After using StippleGen, I opened it with Inkscape and made it so that the stipples were filled, and had no outline. Sometimes Inkscape would crash, but eventually it worked. I resized the image down, and exported it as a png. Pretty sure it was with 300 dpi. This png was then transferred into my handy Processing footprint sketch! From there, placed onto the board. It was important to make sure that the blobby part of the art didn’t touch anything major!
Some interesting things had to happen to make the pins/pads layer show up just how I imagined (thanks everyone who helped me with this!). In order for the art to appear with the gold, you have to make sure that the soldermask isn’t covering it, and have a copper fill behind it! This is what it looks like with the soldermask layer on:
With the .pcb file, it’s just a bunch of text, so it is easy to modify a huge amount of things that way. It was fun to see TextEdit struggling with replacing 62,919 items! 
The pretty colours of the gerbers are always funky to look at!
My goal for releasing this open source is: to inspire people to do random cool scripty things with gEDA and make interesting art! Hopefully they will post up a pic up online of their creation too!
The Plasma RoboGlyph is open source under the CERN OHL v1.1. Here you can find the Plasma RoboGlyph files!
Below are the credits, let me know if I goofed up on anything so it can be fixed!
The Plasma RoboGlyph is an exploration in pcb art of sorts!
The plasma image is from Luc Viatour, check it out here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc_viatour/4326216018/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/luc_viatour/StippleGen 2.02 was used to transform the plasma image. We used 8,268 stipples, 0.50 min. dot size, and 10.00 dot size range. StippleGen is made by Evil Mad Science! And you can play with StippleGen yourself here:
http://evilmadscientist.com/go/stipple2The charlieplexing aspect was inspired by Open Heart kit by Jimmie Rodgers. It’s sophisticated simplicity was really nice, and the Instructable was good to learn about charlieplexing too! (Hopefully I did it right!)
http://jimmieprodgers.com/kits/openheart/
http://www.instructables.com/id/Arduino-Charliplexed-Heart-just-in-time-for-Valen/The first few prototypes of the Plasma RoboGlyph were fabbed at the OSH Park! Their boards are purple and gold, and it’s a great service. Check it out here:
http://www.oshpark.comThe medium sized OSHW logo on the board is from the gEDA format of logos that Windell Oskay made. You can find all the logos here:
http://oshwlogo.com/Finally, credit to the whole maker community for being fun, cool, and helpful with answering questions & learning more!
Well, maybe this will inspire more random and interesting pcb’s to be made It’s important to try and make sure they are functional in some way too, charlieplexed LEDs are good for that! Also speaking about functional… I don’t have these boards yet, so have no idea if they work or not! 
PS: No, the website on the board doesn’t work yet. Still debating what to do with all these RoboGlyph experiments that I want to make! 
Happy pcb art-ing everyone!
RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 – Open Source under CERN OHL v1.1
Having various projects open source is a great learning tool. I probably wouldn’t have been able to make anything if there were no open source gEDA projects (Evil Mad Science makes a lot of open source projects that use gEDA), or wouldn’t be able to make an Arduino derivative if it wasn’t open source, or wouldn’t have been able to check my voltage regulator circuit against an experts circuit!
My goal for making the RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 open source is: someone will see the board with the artwork, want to put their own artwork on it, realise that it is possible, and learn all about schematics pcbs geda and bash in the process. Of course, hopefully they post a pic up online of their own board too!
The RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 is open source under the CERN OHL v1.1. Here you can find the RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 files!
Hopefully nothing is forgotten in the credits. If there’s something messed up in the credits, let me know so I can fix it!
The RoboBrrd Brain board is based off of the Arduino Uno R3 by the Arduino team. It’s a really cool board that is a lot of fun, you can find out more about it here:
http://arduino.ccWe looked at the Diavolino by Evil Mad Science a lot for making the RoboBrrd Brain Board as theirs was created in gEDA too. The Diavolino information can be found here:
http://evilmadscience.com/productsmenu/tinykitlist/180
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2010/diavolino/For some of the symbols and footprints in the schematic and pcb files, we used Matt Pandina’s version. You can see his .sym’s & .fp’s in src.zip here:
https://sites.google.com/site/artcfox/demystifying-the-tlc5940For some other symbols and footprints, they were from gEDA Symbols. A variety of these were used, and the authour information should be within their footprint or symbol. Check out gEDA Symbols here:
http://gedasymbols.orgFor our voltage regulator circuit, we looked at the Menta design from Adafruit Industries. Especially the 3.3V regulator section of the circuit and the capacitors. Here is where you can find out more about the Menta:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/795
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-MentaThe first few prototypes of the RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 were fabbed at the OSH Park! Their boards are purple and gold, and it’s a great service. Check it out here:
http://www.oshpark.comThe medium sized OSHW logo on the board is from the gEDA format of logos that Windell Oskay made. You can find all the logos here:
http://oshwlogo.com/Finally, credit to the whole maker community for being fun, cool, and helpful with answering questions & learning more!
Here are some things with the files that would be good to know:
- The BOM included was just generated from the netlist, and it may not have the values of the jumpers and misc parts. It does have the resistors and capacitors values, though.
- The schematic is a little ‘all over the place’ compared to others. It kind of grew wildly as I was adding some things to it, and I didn’t make it very neat.
- Oh yeah, I haven’t tested the board in real life since I don’t have the board yet! So it may not work at all. :p
- If something is missing, let me know so I can fix it up
I tried to read the TAPR license and the CERN license many times, but reading this type of document is quite challenging for me. See, they write the document thinking that the way it will be read is from one line to the next line. This is incredibly annoying, since I read right-left-bottom-top-middle-left-upsidedown and not in order. Oh, and the TAPR license starts off with a huge preamble book that you have to read through, so by the time you reach the actual license part, you’re already super tired.
Since I couldn’t figure out what the differences were, I chose CERN because it’s more modern, they are working on v1.2, the Adafruit raspberry pi plate uses it so it was a good example (and they are experts so they hopefully know what is happening), and the logo is very cute. It would be nice if in the future each license would be required to make a human-readable form.
The above is just my opinion on the licenses. I don’t mean any offence to one license or the other, or whoever made them.
The next RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 post will be when I receive the boards! I can’t wait for that, pretty excited!
RoboBrrd CAD Files Clarification
They aren’t available yet, because it doesn’t WORK! The beak mechanism still needs some fine tuning, and it is pointless for me to allow everyone in the world to make their own crippled RoboBrrds.
When it does work finally, the .svg’s will be available and they will be open source Just wanted to clarify this for everyone, we have had a lot of people asking since Maker Faire which is really nice! I’m as eager as everyone else is to make it work finally
In the meantime, check out the Instructable for the popsicle stick version of RoboBrrd!
There will be more RoboBrrd blog posts coming up soon! Chrrp chrrrrrrp!
Learning Pet at the Open Hardware Summit
Learning Pet had a fantastic time at the Open Hardware Summit!
Before the summit started, we were sitting at the sculpture robo-busking for votes! At that point, Ian came over and wanted to do an interview! It was an excellent interview, and he uploaded it really quickly at the summit so we could get more votes for the scholarship! Thanks Ian!
I actually did go to some of the talks! Specifically, the ones in the morning before the break. The Arduino Team’s keynote was really really great!
After that, I sort of hung around the cafeteria area showing off Learning Pet! A lot of people said they would vote, which was really great! After the crowd died down, I went into the cafeteria area to watch the stream and maybe work on some ADK stuff.
That was when the creator of ThingSpeak himself caught me and said Hello! ThingSpeak is a really cool Internet of Things website. It’s relatively small and new, which is why I like it compared to the others.
He told me about the location data parameter in the API. I never knew this existed! Then I was wondering how to get the location from Mac OS, if there was actually a framework for that. It turned out that there was! Wow! And it was since 10.6 too! I never knew this! Making it work was really great, it was only checking to see if it worked was what we really got caught on (because the XML file goes from oldest to newest).
It was then when I saw David Cuartielles from the Arduino team when I waved, who joined the table. We were talking about Learning Pet, and it turned out that he was the one who created the Processing ADK Tool! Wow! What a cooincidence!
I told him about all of the bugs, and asked how I can fix them. He showed me the code for the ADK tool, and walked me through how to build it in Eclipse! Building a tool for Processing is a little different because you have to tell ant that there are some things that are already pre-compiled, so it doesn’t have to check them.
I played around with the code for a while and sort of got used to the way things work. There are some places where it will be tricky to be able to do what I want to specifically do.
We also tried to figure out why there are four parameters on the Arduino side, and only three on the Android App side. It turns out that the Arduino is the one telling the Android what App it needs, rather than the other way around. This means that of course the Arduino side needs the description and website parameters. Which I guess makes more sense in retrospect
I’ll definitely be helping out more with this Processing ADK Tool stuff. The thing that motivates me the most is that when I first got the ADK and Android, I figured that this should be about 10x easier and 50x quicker than making an iOS App. It wasn’t, and many other people feel the same way, but now it is my goal to make it so.
We did listen to some of the talks while we were down hacking and learning on some code. They were really good! I didn’t manage to get to the breakout session, but they were all sort of scattered and I wasn’t listening to the directions anyway… playing with the code was more fun.
Oh yeah! And I also bought a hackerspace passport from Mitch Altman! It is so cool to see them in real life, they look like a real passport!
The Demo session was fun, lots of people loved Learning Pet and also said that they voted for it! However, when they announced the winners, Learning Pet didn’t place in the top three. I really appreciate everyone voting, though. To be honest and somewhat egotistical, I think Learning Pet’s documentation was the best and most complete. No one even came close!
Here is a video by johngineer about Learning Pet! Thanks johngineer!
Watch video on Vimeo
The one thing that I would improve though, is to make the organizers a little more friendly towards everyone, and not just caring primarily about the sponsors. Yes, it is important to make the sponsors feel good since without them then there wouldn’t be this event, but it is also important to make the people at the summit itself feel good also. For example, at the demo session one of the organizers was talking with all of these sponsors in front of my demo area and goofing around and taking photos, but never bothered to say hello or ask about my project. It was sort of uncool and unmakerly (if that’s a word). The way I think of it is… you might as well be friendly to everyone, because we are all in this together!
All in all, the Open Hardware Summit was great for connecting with some of the people I have met online! It also turned out to be a great learning experience for building tools for Processing, and seeing how the Processing ADK tool actually compiles with API v10 rather than v7 (it is literally just setting the number different hahahaha)!
Also, Learning Pet appeared in the Adafruit blog randomly! It was awesome!
Learning Pet – VOTE! (Open Hardware Summit Scholarship)
VOTE FOR LEARNING PET IN THE OPEN HARDWARE SUMMIT SCHOLARSHIP!
Introducing Learning Pet, a mini RoboBrrd with a very large theme- education! Learning Pet enriches lessons by creating a physical interface to interact with the virtual world.
We demonstrate a number sorting game, where the student interacts with the robot to blast virtual UFO’s with the lowest value. Correct answers are celebrated with a wing flap, and each level-up with a dance. We use the Accessory Development Kit to interface with mobile devices while away from the computer.
On LearningPet’s webpage, it has all the detailed information about the hardware, software and design. There is also a handy checklist at the top, so that at a glance you can quickly see the important facts.
It would be awesome if you could vote for Learning Pet in the Open Hardware Summit Scholarship! VOTE here!
Here is a YouTube playlist of all the videos!
Apps4Arduino – SALE and INTRODUCING Buttons for Arduino!
=== SALE and INTRODUCTION! ===
Introducing Buttons for Arduino!
Interact with your Arduino in a quick, native and intuitive way using Buttons for Arduino!
=== Features ===
✔ Turn on and off your Arduino outputs with ease using the circle buttons
✔ Finely adjust the PWM outputs using the rotary sliders
✔ Customize button colours
✔ Full-screen mode (supported on 10.7+)
✔ No coding necessary
✔ API available
=== Works great for ===
:: Mood lighting – Have some LEDs connected to your Arduino for backlighting your computer desk, or similar? Easily control which LEDs are on and off to create a mixture of colours to suit your mood
:: Quick testing – Experiment with different outputs and combinations for your project, without touching a single line of code
:: Teaching students – Focus on the outputs and circuits without distractions. Demonstrate what happens when an output is on/off, and when the PWM changes from low to high
:: Live demos – Effectively communicate your project’s output ideas and concepts with others
:: And more! – Arduino projects are only limited by your imagination! Create the next best project, and use Buttons for Arduino to control it
To use Buttons for Arduino with your Arduino, install the ButtonsApp library from Buttons For Arduino’s support website and upload the included example sketch to your Arduino.
That’s it! Sit back, relax, and press some buttons!
Meters for Arduino and Buttons for Arduino are on SALE for $0.99 for a limited time! Celebrating the Open Hardware Summit and Maker Faire NY!
Get them on the Mac App Store here:
http://itunes.com/mac/buttonsforarduino
http://itunes.com/mac/metersforarduino
Also available as a tweetware option:
http://robotgrrl.com/apps4arduino/meters.php
http://robotgrrl.com/apps4arduino/buttons.php
Buttons for Arduino and Meters for Arduino are open source under the BSD 3-Clause License! Fork their repositories here:
https://github.com/RobotGrrl/Buttons-For-Arduino
https://github.com/RobotGrrl/Meters-For-Arduino
ENJOY!
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