Robot Party Extravaganza Recap!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, May 7th, 2012

The Robot Party from last week was fantastic! It was LIVE from Evil Mad Science where we showed the LetsMakeRobots v4 drawing with prizes from seeedstudio using NilsB’s robot that Andrew relayed for us! PHEW!

There were many cool robots on this Robot Party! It’s most excellent to see everyone helping everyone! Here we are holding up some robots, the Eggbot and RoboBrrd and a Medium Tank!

You can watch the recording of the Robot Party on YouTube on this playlist!

Here is part 1 of 5!

Watch on YouTube

The complete list of winners is here!
http://letsmakerobots.com/node/31820

Chaot’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeTsyiKaJoQ

RobotFreak’s live drawing is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxVMKiFoXto

It was great to see the robots working live! Here was another robot that stopped by- DataBus from the Sparkfun Autonomous Vehicle Challenge!

Eaglesnest Robotics was also there! They got to show off their Meggy Jr RGBs to the Evil Mad Scientists themselves! Pretty cool!

Didn’t get a chance to donate? Good news! Adafruit Industries has added 5 more prizes! So pop over to LetsMakeRobots now and donate! More info to come on when they will be drawn, and maybe more special things will happen!

LIVE ROCKS! Special thanks to Evil Mad Science for being there LIVE and their speedy internet to broadcast the Robot Party!

See everyone again on Thursday, 8PM ET / 5PM PT!
http://robotgrrl.com/robotparty

Posted in: EMSL, Fun, Robot Party.

A little bit of random everything!

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

After Maker Faire everything has been sort of buzzing in my head. There’s lots of new things to try, learn, and share! Of course, I was pretty much blanked out afterwards with a cold, which meant I unfortunately couldn’t go to SecondConf where I was invited to speak , and then last Thursday/Friday/Saturday/Sunday I was super tired. x_x But, here is a post with tons of pictures nonetheless

Learning Pet – Polymorph Phail, OpenSCAD and gEDA

To advance Learning Pet more, there has to be some sort of way to actually make these that doesn’t involve tens of hours of effort for each one. I was thinking maybe I could take a shortcut on this whole laser cutter/3d printer ordeal and use polymorph!

We created a stencil out of popsicle sticks:

First attempt was to lay the polymorph flat and use the stencil like a cookie cutter:

It turned out to be way to flimsy and thin. It would be more of a jello brrd than a RoboBrrd with the servos on it. Bah! Second try was to fill the stencil with the polymorph:

This was stronger in some parts, but it sort of broke at the top. Third attempt in the same way, but more better:

The third way is definitely strong, but it still takes ages to create. Not to mention, it destroyed the stencil trying to get it out. Plus, the polymorph extras are kind of hard to get rid of.

Polymorph is cool, but it may not be the best for creating the frame of a RoboBrrd. This is when I decided to learn OpenSCAD. Learning it isn’t that tricky. There’s some familiarities that you can draw from Matlab in there. The software itself is horrendous. You can rotate and zoom the viewer camera, but not translate, which makes it extremely annoying to try to use. Whatever. At least I don’t have to worry about trying to figure out what buttons on the screen to press to create a shape.

Here’s a screenie of an exploded view of the shapes that I created:

The school I mentor for FIRST robotics has a 3d printer, so we were going to print them out. This is them on the stl viewer. I like how it looks slightly Tron (original Tron) like:

They haven’t been printed yet, and actually I may not have the chance to pick them up if they were printed! But the idea was to experiment and see if the nubs would actually fit, seeing as how they are exactly the same size.

I learned later on about the same sort of technique with a laser cutter at Spikenzie Labs, you can read more into it in the next section

The boards are also going to be another thing to create. I’m attempting to try to learn gEDA (each time I try to pronounce the software it sounds like some sort of cheese), which is a PCB/schematics/board bundle of awesome! The learning curve for this though seems like a vertical line, it almost reminds me of Objective-C in that way. Which can only mean good things!

I didn’t save my original screenshot of playing with gEDA, but it looked like a board with chicken-pox, because there were lots of holes (which are called vias?). However, I was playing with text, and weird stuff happens with text. Depending on whatever colour you pick, it writes it normally, or it writes it flipped horizontally, so “w00t” becomes “m00f”, hahaha!

I couldn’t install gEDA on my Mac under fink or Macports unfortunately, but it works fine on Ubuntu. Oh yeah if anyone is wondering, the file I was playing with was the OHS badge. It’s cool. No idea how on earth they made the curved lines yet, but I hope to figure that out eventually. There’s lots of resources online about gEDA, so I just have to read them and figure it out, and climb this vertical learning curve ;P

There also has to be more software developed for Learning Pet, but I don’t want to go too crazy with it. I’ve been trying to figure out what platforms should be followed, and which ones should not. Or are we even at that point to make that decision? :/ I might just make some software for several platforms, then run some trials and see which ones are better.

Of course, Learning Pet itself is a platform! So it will also have to be able to play some *small* games. I’m looking forward to this part, like maybe I will save game data in an EEPROM or something? Or just save it in an SD card so that way it is more “modular”?

That’s about it for Learning Pet today. I’m working on a module where the sensor and button can sit on its own platform, making it have more of a purpose of working with a specific set of software. It will also have LEDs!

Spikenzie Labs

When I went in to visit my FIRST team, I also visited Spikenzie labs! Their laser cutter is awesome!

Here you can see some of the watch faces being cut out

They were also faced with the challenge of getting the slots to fit together. For them, they had to take into account the beam of the laser and all sorts of other interesting math. However, the result is nice slots that fit perfectly together:

This knowledge is great, and will definitely help This is the sort of technique that I would want to use in Learning Pet’s structure.

They also gave me free stuff. LOTS of free stuff!

More about building them in the next section. Thanks for the free stuff Andy & Mark!

Random Everything

The VoiceShield looks really cool. Unfortunately mine doesn’t play sounds, only noise. It may be because I’m doing something wrong with the uploading or something. I should also go back and check all the soldering. In concept though, it is really cool. It lets you upload sounds to this chip, and you’re able to play them individually or in sequence, which would be really handy for some of RoboBrrd’s sounds!

Soldered the MPTH kit too. It’s also pretty cool! Send in serial and have it displayed on the screen. Nice!

The LoL shield! YAY! If anyone tells you it only takes an hour to complete this shield, they are either a professional, or completely wrong. I had some trouble with a few LEDs, but it turned out that they needed more solder. There are also a few LEDs that flicker. I haven’t figured out how to fix them yet though. The white LEDs are beautiful!

This poem on the back of the LoL shield is so deep.

I gave one of the Propellers a go, and made it so that if I press gently on the button thing, then the LED will light up! However, these button things are kind of weird in the way that if you press down, then it shorts out (I guess), making the value 0. If you press lightly on the middle pad, the value ranges up to 1. The default value is also 0. So it is kind of hard to figure out, either that or I’m doing something wrong, which is most likely

I’m in the middle of trying to organize everything. It’s INSANE. Luckily it doesn’t look like this anymore, but I still have a few other things to organize away.

DOGCOW’s Ping))) sensor has sort of been a running joke on the Robot Party. Turns out it does work, I was just doing it wrong hahahaha

Here are my broken servos. This would definitely make a GREAT Christmas tree ornament!

And with that, moving on to the next section!

Old Popsicle Stick Constructions

Popsicle sticks and hot glue are great for creating things. Here are some things that I started to create, but haven’t finished. They were mainly created to let me visualize things that I was thinking about.

This robot was supposed to have LEDs spinning on its motor. It got me thinking about this design challenge, where you will have to somehow be able to power the LEDs even though it is spinning. If the LEDs were to blink, it would be better just to have the blinking circuit also spinning.

Here is proto-brrd. It’s skeleton served as a way to play around with the beak mechanism. It was also good to try the design before building the green RoboBrrd It always makes me laugh the way the bottom beak falls down…

This is a weirdo LED giraffe type of animal/creation. Its weak legs jittered around the desk as the spinning counter-weight tail moved, and as the head spun around. It was fun to see how fast the pennys flew off of the counter-weight sometimes.

Last was this interesting stretching armature thingamajig. It had an elastic to pull the two arms tight, but the motor would be able to push them apart. Since the motor didn’t have that much torque, it didn’t work that reliably.

Misc

I also visited Robot Shop headquarters. Had a tour of the place, it’s pretty cool!

My friend & inspiration Jeri (link goes to one of my favourite videos) is going to be in this film called Pinball Donut Girl. She’s really cool. I’ve had the chance to play some pinball, and it’s really fun. There’s a lot of electronics that happens behind the scenes too. The film needs funding, and it’s being crowdsourced. So instead of your coffee today, consider putting the money towards this! I only donated $7, but collectively it can get funded! YAH! GO DONATE NOW!

Last but not least, winter is fast approaching! Get out there and enjoy the autumn nature

Posted in: Other, Projects.

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!

Click to download BubbleBoyUNO v01 pde

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.

A HUGE WAVE OF BLOG POSTS IS ARRIVING!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, March 12th, 2010

I’m ghostbusting all of the blog zombies out of here to document all of the robotic awesomeness that has happened in the recent history! It’s spring break starting in a few more hours, which totally means MAKEation (a vacation where you MAKE stuff) time! I started this blarg because I wanted to have a record of stuff that I’ve done, so here are some posts that will be arriving, in rough order of future to past:

1. MAKEation Wrap Up (March 21, 2010)
2. Interval MAKEation posts (idk)
3. MAKEation Start! (March 13, 2010)
4. Projects Statii (March 12, 2010)
5. Half of Spring 2010 Photography (For some reason a ton of people on facebook love it when I post the photos that I have taken during the semester, so I figured I might as well post them on here too) (idk)
6. Where I’m at and Where I’m teleporting (aka: where i am and where i’m going – reflection) (idk)
7. Well-Read’edness in Social Robotics (idk)
8. The epic journey of installing ROS on Mac OS 10.6 (idk)
9. BAM! iRobot Create (March 9, 2010)
10. Creepy Furby Hack (FNR – March 5, 2010)
11. Tap-dancing Styrobot? (FNR – March 5, 2010)
12. CMUcam2 in MATLAB (March 2, 2010)
13. coreplot in iPhone Apps (Feb 24, 2010)
14. Proposed ideas for PR2 and ROS (March 1, 2010)
15. Robot T-shirts (Jan 14, 2010)
16. Antarctic Night – Robots from contest to classroom (Feb 11, 2010)
17. Ethical Dilemmas of the 3 Laws of Robotics (Nov 3, 2009)
18. MANOI Walking (FNR – Nov 13, 2009)
19. Girl Scout Robotics Activity (Nov 8, 2009)
20. Shaking hands with a robot (Nov 3, 2009)
21. Learning about ATtinys (FNR – Nov 29, 2009)
22. Elvis + iRobot (FNR- Nov 1, 2009)

w00t! =)

Posted in: Other, Projects.

CMUcam2 in Matlab! & Project updates!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

On Sunday, a breakthrough was made with regards to getting the CMUcam2 to send a frame back to Matlab! Amazing! It works!

Check out the screenshots:

(something bright was being shone onto the camera)

(lens cap on (yes they make lens caps that small))

It’s quite noticeable that the resolution is very small. In fact, it’s only about 10 pixels in size!

I started off small so that we could have something that works, then go from there. It’s only sending the green channel too, which helps improve the latency.

The way it works now is that it asks for a few hundred bytes of data. From there, we search through the array to find a 1, or the start of the frame, until a 3, or the end of the frame. This is stored into a new variable so that we can search through it (again!) and plot the data.

Plotting the data needs some improvement. Not too sure how to handle this yet– should I make a Processing app that will be able to save the image as a .png? Or can Matlab write images too? Hmm!

Post a comment if you want me to post the code, I just don’t want to post something that’s incomplete and will essentially confuse everyone.

Other projects statii:

PR2 Proposal

Out of the 120 Letters of Intent that WillowGarage received for the PR2 Beta program, one of them is one from Clarkson University!

There are ten robots that are going to be given away. Coincidentally, the research teams that win will be notified on March 26th — that’s the date of the Boston FIRST regional (which Team 229 is attending and is going to ROCK THE ROBOT HOUSE)!

We’re giving it our best shot, and it’s looking really cool! If you see me around, ask me about it!

This whole process has been super exciting. Our proposal is being wrapped up, though it’s only due March 1st (that’s in six days, we still have plenty of time). My two sections are pretty much complete except for some stuff. I’ll be blogging about it on March 1st at 8:00PM, so keep an eye out!

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Sociable Robotics

The Socializing a Social Robot with an Artificial Society SURE abstract from the summer has been added to the Honors Summer Research 2009 page! Finally! ^_^

Also, I refined my paper with logic that can easily be followed now, and included Zoomify graphs of the results. This makes it easy for readers to scan and interpret the graphs themselves. Plus, Zoomify graphs are always fun.

As for the code… I still have to get on to documenting it. It’s a lot of work, so I’m just getting through it step by step. Lesson learned: although comments are distracting when you’re working on the code, it’s horrible to go back and then spend time to comment it. Always comment. No exceptions!

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SecondLife Statistics Project

We finally parsed through the data and found something really striking. When the economic downturn in real life appeared, the usage hours on SecondLife rose, and kept on rising for a few months! The virtual economy was booming. It’s almost like as if people were tired of the real life, and wanted the easy success of the virtual world.

Though, there was eventually a decrease in the usage hours on SecondLife. This leads us to wonder if…
1) Is there a lag between RL and SL?
2) Did people notice that there weren’t as many opportunities on SL as when they first joined?

It’s really cool to think about this sort of stuff. It makes you wonder what Oreo sales have been like throughout this modern recession. I would love to study Oreo sales, I think they would be really representative of the economic situations. Either that, or Oreo sales always remain constant.

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Team 229

This build season I helped out with the website a lot. We were coming from nothing, and now we have a beautiful source of information, all collected together!

It was quite a load of work, however help from the teammates and mentors helped very much. Go check it out!

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Physics Team Design

In Physics II there are two lab sections that allow you to participate in a team based design course. The challenge is to model the velocity of a hobby train with given voltages. We do this using photogates… and a piece of National Instruments hardware that measures data at a rate of 400,000. I’m not sure what the units are, but it’s pretty amazing! The challenge sessions are where we apply this model, trying to predict the train’s movements based on the data that we have collected.

The way the data is collected is through LabView. Unfourtunately, the program that is used was deleted… so the professor/TA needed some help to fix it. After working on it for a few hours, we figured it out and got it to work!

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iPhone Stuff

I’ve been playing around with core-plot and working on an app lately- it’s 80% done, and will be out on the App store within the next few weeks!

We’re still trying to sort out if we’re going to Open Source it, and how that would work (since we want people to buy the App too…!). Perhaps we could just *suggest* a donation whenever people try to download the code? Anyone have any experience with Open Source App business model plans?

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Random

Coming back from winter break to school was tricky this time around… since I was outside the entire day playing hockey during the break!!! Although Clarkson has open skate, their ice mixture is really weird, and there’s no pickup hockey games Better than nothing, though.

I bought two shirts from shirt.woot, and they are awesome. One of them is ‘I Fought the Laws’, and has three pictures of crazy robots. The other is a robot that is plugged in to a wall outlet, leading to its heart. ^_^

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That’s all for now! Keep it real, humans and robots. =)

Posted in: Art, Other, Programming, Projects, Robot, School.

Where Am I?

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 21st, 2008

Why were there no blog posts for a week? EEEEEK!

I was studying….working…programming! ^^

I’ll skip the terribly boring stuff and get to the point(s)
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday – track practice
- Spent Friday in Ottawa ^^
- Half of Saturday I soldered stuff
- Sunday I programmed in a GUI & went biking in mud with a friend
- Monday I am watching the Habs Homework I’ll do after

There was an extremely good day at school last week… we get to make a Rube Goldberg machine for Physics!! This is SO cool it’s unbelievable to have this opportunity. I’m still in awe, and verrry excited to start working with the wood with our team! Sure… our team may go overboard for a simple simple machine combination contraption … but when will the chance of building a Rube Goldberg machine come around again? ;P

What I am working on now is getting my LCD to display a custom screen that I drew out on paper. What the problem appears to be is that it can’t handle many characters… I have 3 custom characters… I FINALLY got the 3rd line to work, so now I have to figure out the 4th line. It’s really annoying. I’ll figure out, somehow, how to cut down the amount of info/characters that has to be displayed.

Additionally, I’m working on making a SQLite database interface for conversation links and language models. Once I get it working, I’ll be linking it up with Robbie. You can then imagine all the possibilities with regards to the different language models that will be downloadable! I’m thinking a gigantor mental math mini-game one…

My fingers on my right hand are insane… thumb- raw’ish from soldering. index- has something wrong with it as I can’t lift it middle- a chunk of skin is missing because I unplugged my magsafe the wrong way… ring- my grad ring is ALWAYS falling off pinky- sprained a bit, from … I have no clue o_o

That’s all for now. I like how next year’s FIRST robotics is going to be completely different, with the new WPI programmer software and all! 802.11n will be great for ANNs too. I hope I am lucky enough to take part in FIRST next year!

Posted in: Other, Projects.