Vote for RoboBrrd in the laser cutter contest! ~( ^v^ )~

All of the photos that you see on the Instructable, and more, are now on Flickr!

So you can see what tools you need more clearly:

One of my favourite things about this RoboBrrd was how shiny it was on the insides:

Plus, the wiring is super tidy!

With the hula hoop on, this reminds me of something like a RoboBrrd peace sign…

Speaking of hula hoop, here are two capacitors that look like a happy face! They are placed on the two motor pins, going to ground.

The legs ran away! Hahahaha

Gluing the eyes on is super fun. It always amazes me how well the two materials, hot glue and googely eye, bond together. They are very sturdy.

You can see all of the steps for the RoboBrrd on the Instructable here. Please vote and ask your friends to vote for RoboBrrd in the laser cutter contest! It means a lot

One of the cool things about RoboBrrd is that it is so silly that anyone can like it, and anyone can learn a little bit more about robotics from it. For example, an often overlooked part of robotics- laying out the electronics and wiring so that everything fits nicely, without wasting too much space or not having enough space. With this RoboBrrd, we took this into consideration when designing the base, and tried to not waste any extra space, while still having enough room for maintenance and wires. Cool eh!

We’ll be posting more updates throughout the week, so stay posted!

I like to think of robotics as the art of trying to accomplish something despite the numerous things that don’t work. Last week, before heading off to GTR, I made an effort to try to get a RoboBrrd video done. It didn’t happen, because there was a crazy number of things that didn’t work.

I tried to use the TLC5940 chip that also controls RoboBrrd’s eyes to control the servos. It was hard to set up because there had to be many short wires attached to places that already had a lot of wires attached. I used two LiPo’s in series as the battery, for a total of 7.4V. Some of the servos were working, some were acting funny. I added in a 10uF capacitor to see if filtering the voltage would help. One of the servos stopped working… I wondered why, and read the product’s specs (this is probably best done BEFORE you start to do anything with the product). They are only rated for 6V!

The TLC5940 was sloppy at controlling the servos anyway, so I decided to go with the servo library. At this point, I also needed a voltage regulator to bring down the voltage to 5V. I got the LM317, and prototyped it on a breadboard first. It seemed to work okay, so I soldered it onto the protoboard. Once I plugged in a servo, the voltage would drop down to 2V, and the servo wouldn’t move. After much help with the kind people in irc.freenode.net#fmcg, we deduced that I used the wrong pinout for the plastic package. See, the old guy at the electronics store printed out the first page of the LM317 datasheet and kindly drew on it the pinout. The pinout he gave was wrong.

Once the LM317 issue was fixed, it was getting extremely hot. This was quickly and easily fixed with a giant heatsink.

The final issue was encountered during the Robot Party on Thursday. There’s some sort of conflict between the TLC5940 library and the servo library. On the higher level, the Tlc.init() function is causing the problem. I haven’t looked into the lower level causes of it yet. Has anyone else had this problem?

The RoboBrrd videos have to start rolling, so I decided to throw in another Arduino to quickly fix the issue. It would be great to find a better solution, though.

You can see the video LIVE on Ask an Engineer tonight! Woohoo!

Or, you can watch it here:

There is still a lot of stuff that I have to do, but we’re at a good place now to start the videos. Here’s a list:
- Add in sensor functionality to RoboBrrd
- Make the base able to move
- Cover the other panels with green felt
- Decorate the base
- Make RoboBrrd #2 so #1 can interact with it (so it won’t be lonely)

When the videos get rolling, that’s when more of the DIY posts will start showing up!

There are a bunch of new photos in the RoboBrrd collection for your viewing pleasure!

This is a really exciting robot, and thanks again to Adafruit for sponsoring all of the electronics. Woot woop!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. GO OPEN SOURCE!

I’ll post more later, but I really want to get these board soldered and robots working

However, that really only began after supper. I went to buy some tiny wire jumpers and a big bread board (I like big boards and I can not lie) … and a squishy button. Plus, I saw they had vibrating motors, so I bought one! I’m going to implement it into this pink snowman as a bristlebot. So- imagine this – a pink snowman that can bob its head forwards and backwards, move side to side, and navigate around by means of a bristlebot

Sounds fun to me! The only thing I don’t get is how I will connect it all together…

Here are some technology as art pictures of what I did today…

This morning, as I now remember it, I wanted to make stuff via the terminal. I hit a roadblock when my gcc compiler didn’t work! I’ll have to figure out that one later – I think I need to install it again.

Another interesting thing that happened today was somehow I glitched one of Ty.com’s Beanie Baby 2.0 games- it gave me SO much free stuff. It was amazing! My big book of Beanies is looking pretty fab!

Tomorrow I’ll buy the squishy parts for the pink snowman as the hobby shop was closed, even though it was only 11 minutes after 6:00. :/ Who would leave their store exactly when it is closed? Wouldn’t you have to take inventory, clear the till?! Gwaaaah! And who closes at 6:00 anyway…

Arrrg- I really want some BOOKS about AI & NLP! All I was hoping for was just 1 bursary @ MRSTF to buy books…