RoboBrrd 3D Printed Pieces – OPEN SOURCE HARDWARE!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013

Introducing the new RoboBrrd 3D printed pieces!

These are all the 3D printing files for creating your own RoboBrrd! You can download the .stl files and get printing right away and also view the dimensional drawings. Check out the webpage!

The dream of having RoboBrrd as a widespread toy all around the world is what is really motivating us. OSHW combined with availability of 3D printers, it can be possible!

One day, there will be more RoboBrrds in the world than Furbys, and everyone will make it themselves.

It seems odd that we go to a store to purchase a toy when we can create one ourselves. So let’s do it, and make a positive impact! Manufacture our own toys, customize them, learn about them, build them into robots, make them better.

We put a lot of effort into the webpage by making the pics look fun & groovy. With the 3D Viewer Mode, it’s great to be able to spin, zoom, rotate 3D files. Many people dismiss RoboBrrd as goofy/stupid/useless, so it is also nice to show the thought that went in to RoboBrrd.

On the technical side, creating the pieces to work with both the laser cut pieces and 3d pieces was interesting. The two variables were the extrusion width, and the kerf. Figuring out the extrusion width was straight forward- we measured the mdf with calipers, and they said 3.05mm. As for the kerf, it was exactly +0.2mm different than the laser cut ones. Funnily enough, the laser cut kerf adjustment was -0.1mm, which meant all that needed to be changed was the – sign to a + sign.

There is a donation button on the webpage, which will help us to create even more robots. Each donation will come with a ‘RoboBrrd Name Card’ that you can fill out and give to your newly created RoboBrrd. If you do donate, thanks a bunch!

Well, what are you waiting for? LET’S GO PRINT A ROBOBRRD!

Posted in: 3D, Fun, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Open Hardware Summit Fun

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

This year for Open Hardware Summit I lucked out with being accepted as a speaker, demo presenter, and poster presenter!

^ pic from @GrishinRobotics

As a speaker, I presented a delightfully short presentation titled ‘Sharing the Inspiration with Robot Kits’. It was shorter than the allotted time (3 mins out of a given 5 mins), and I was entirely frightened (compared to my SecondConf talk a few days ago where I was completely calm). The reaction on Twitter was quite nice, and I do recall people clapping at the end of the talk.

^ pic from @LittleTinkerCo

The recording of the talk will most likely be up on YouTube later on at some point. I’ll be sure to post about it when it is up. In the meantime, if you want you can find it somewhat near the end of this ustream recording.

With a short talk such as this one, I figured the only way to leave the audience with something memorable would be a quote. But you know, using someone else’s quote is so boring, so I created my own quote of a quote:

Once a wise robot told me via Serial.println that Robots teach us about ourselves.

The presentation is up on SlideShare here.

The demo table was fun. It was great to be able to answer some more detailed questions about RoboBrrd. We had all the RoboBrrds working there!

This robot here loves to be all swaggy with its awesome badge from 2011!

The posters were a great addition to the demos. Here was the RoboBrrd and Robot Party poster!

Here are the posters digitally:

There was definitely a big difference from last year to this year on my end. Since OHS 2011, I participated in Montreal Startup Weekend, and also the International Startup Festival, so I sort of had a clue now of what some of the people were talking about this year. Yet, some of it was still beyond my comprehension at this point. OHS is an interesting conference because of all the multiple disciplines, combined with the enthusiasm!

I’m looking forward to next year already, since I will hopefully learn even more before then, and be able to participate in the discussions more intelligently.

Until then, thank you to the organizers and volunteers for making a really nice day! It was really fun to meet everyone and it was a great environment!

Posted in: Fun, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Hello Oshawatt!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, September 15th, 2012

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!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Plasma RoboGlyph! — Open source pcb art ^_^

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

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!

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/stipple2

The 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.com

The 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!

Posted in: Electrical, EMSL, Fun.

RoboBrrd Brain Board v2 – Open Source under CERN OHL v1.1

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

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.cc

We 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-tlc5940

For 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.org

For 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-Menta

The 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.com

The 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!

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), WyoLum Progress.

Building Learning Pet

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, September 26th, 2011

Here’s what you may not know about Learning Pet: It was created in 4.5 days.

When I heard about the Open Hardware Summit Scholarship contest, I couldn’t let this opportunity pass. The prize would do more than wonders to get this idea flying. For example: A 3D printer would be able to be bought and used to create parts for kits. Also, we would have been able to order some custom PCBs online with the winnings, too.

When I heard about the contest later on that evening was when I started (Sept 8). I created the structure and beak mechanism all in that one night

The first day (Sept 9), the mini RoboBrrd character was crafted, and all servos and LEDs tested and functional.

The second day (Sept 10), the modular electronics board was created. Featuring a slide-out drawer for the Google Android ADK This was also my birthday! Hooray!

Third day (Sept 11), all of the circuits and wiring was complete. Had some pitfalls during the day trying to use different connectors, but switched to the ones you see below in the photo. The plugs are great, really sturdy!

Here’s a timelapse of some parts of the build:

Forth day was for creating the software and documentation, and submitting to the contest rather early. My train was leaving the next day, so I had to get everything done ahead of time

We didn’t win the contest, or place in the top 3. Somehow. So this became yet another unobtained opportunity, but I can definitely say that Learning Pet was a competitive entry. The documentation webpage was a force not to be reckoned with compared to the other entries. Learning Pet has a purpose that would benefit society. Furthermore, I created a demo prototype for the video about my idea.

Maybe some people will think that it was crazy to pour in all this dedication to one robot. If it would have won, it wouldn’t have seemed crazy. Success is defined as getting up one more time than you’ve been knocked down. I’ll still be continuing with Learning Pet, the idea is exciting and education desperately needs an effective use of technology in the classroom, rather than more technology in the classroom.

Thanks again to everyone who left a comment on my Google+ during the build progress! And thanks to the FIRST team that I mentor, COSI, the gang from FMCG, and all my friends for voting!

Also: I used some parts (the large servo and two RGB LEDs, specifically) from the parts that Adafruit Industries sponsored for the original RoboBrrd, so thanks to them also

Posted in: Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), Robot.

Learning Pet at the Open Hardware Summit

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011

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!

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!

Posted in: Android, Fun, Projects.