RoboGames Recap

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

RoboGames 2012 was a blast! RoboBrrd met some new robot friends and interacted with tons of kids, I presented about the Robot Party, and got to talk with some very interesting people! The best part was that it was all able to happen quite last minute thanks to help from the organizers, so thanks guys!

I helped out on Thursday with setting some things up, but on Friday was when all the robots showed up and you started to meet people! It was pretty crazy, here are my robots in the pit area!

While playing with MANOI, the actual MAKER of the MANOIAT01 humanoid kit shows up! Wow! This was totally astonishing, MANOI was the robot that got me into non-lego robots, so it’s a big deal!

He was really great and replaced the gears in one of MANOI’s knee servos! Pretty soon MANOI will be able to do some one-legged balancing tricks perhaps!

This here is what the table looked like with all the robots alive!

We had tons of kids play with RoboBrrd! Some of them said they actually want to go in to robotics so that they can build their own RoboBrrd. How cool is that! Here is one of the champions of RoboGames with RoboBrrd!

One of the kids managed to get all 4 hats to balance:

I also gave a presentation about the Robot Party at the little speakers series organized by Heather Knight! It was a lot of fun. I have no idea if anyone could hear me, but there were lots of pictures to look at at least!

The robots from Robot Japan were great. Here is one of my favourites, the robot is actually wearing the maker’s own kimono!

I also met Lem from robots-dreams, who was very kind to interviewed me! You can read more about that here, or check out the video below.

One of the coolest things ever was being able to meet Jeri in real life! I’ve had some questions about NFC antennas in my brain for a bit of time, and since she works with NFC it was good to be able to ask and get a response instantly.

Super Awesome Sylvia was also there, it was great to meet her! She really likes robots, perhaps one day she will build her own complicated robot or something!

All in all the RoboGames was great. My robots didn’t really fit in because they weren’t as violent as everyone else, but maybe next year there will be more animatronic robots! Maybe there will even be an animatronics category, for the creations that are a bit more than just art, but too cute to be classified as a ‘robot’. Looking forward to it!

Posted in: EMSL, Fun.

RobotGrrl Interview with Robots-Dreams

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

While at RoboGames I had the opportunity to meet Lem from Robots-Dreams! I’ve been a big fan of that site for a while, so it was quite the pleasure when Lem asked if he could interview me.

Here’s the interview, it’s 14 minutes long, it was really fun to do!

The interview ended up getting a lot of blog love! It was posted up on the MAKE blog, Arduino blog, and Adafruit blog.

Wow! This was pretty crazy in a good way, so thanks guys! The video is getting close to 10,000 views!

More blog posts are in the pipeline, so keep your robo-eyes peeled!

Posted in: Fun.

RoboGames! RobotGrrl @ RoboGames 2012 & Robot Party!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

We are going to be at RoboGames 2012! YEAH! It’s going to be a great time!

For sure we will be doing a presentation about the Robot Party (called Remote Robot Hacking) on Sunday at 2:00PM. We still have to make sure that we’ll have a place for our robots, fingers crossed that it won’t be a problem.

EVERYONE should come to the Robot Party presentation! Tell all your friends! It’s only 15 minutes, and it is going to have loads of photos about the Robot Party. It won’t be serious like the other talks. I’ll be telling stories about people and projects from the Robot Party, there will be so many photos to look at on the screen it will be great

Maybe there will even be a little Robot Party or two over the weekend!

FOLLOW ME ON TWITTER @RobotGrrl TO STAY UP TO DATE!
Also if you need to get a hold of me, Twitter will be the best way!

We’ll take lots of pics and videos so that we can share all the fun with you all!

Preparing for this presentation has been pretty intense for the past couple of days. It’s a lot more curating and digging through archives than I thought. The rough intro/outro words were complete last week, which gave me an idea of what archives I should dig through.

Since the Robot Party was originally inspired from the Fatman and Circuit Girl stream, I found the recording from when I was on it, WAY BACK in September 20, 2009! The really cool part about this is that apparently Jeri is also going to be at RoboGames, so it will be great to meet her!

Also dug through my old Ustream recorded videos. Here’s a screenshot from the very first Robot Party, back in September 30, 2011!

Here’s a screenshot of the very first Google+ Robot Party, back in July, 2011!

There are now OODLES of ‘Ye Olde Robot Party’ photos as a collection on Flickr. Check it out!

And even more photos! There are some other uploads of past Robot Party photos on flickr in the Robot Party collection. You can also see them in my Google+ Photo Albums.

Here is the latest and greatest set of photos from the Robot Party last week! Last week we were celebrating National Robotics Week, even though we celebrate robotics every single week! This one had great discussions about OpenCV, 3d modelling, and Android apps. Joey from LWJM.US was there too!

There is still some more archiving and curating to do. It’s been pretty crazy to dig through many months of old footage and prepare it. I’m thinking that maybe there can be a Robot Party MUSEUM webpage that will display lots of Robot Party photos, that we can show at Maker Faire.

Thanks to all the friends who have donated, are donating, and will donate to my robotics fund, and to the friends who are letting me stay over! SEE YOU AT ROBOGAMES & ROBOT PARTY!

Posted in: Maker Faire, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), Robot Party, WyoLum Progress.

Google, ADK, San Mateo Fair, and Diner

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, June 24th, 2011

One of my hacker friends that hangs out in #fmcg also works at Google, so he invited me there for a bit to walk around and have a lunch there!

Big Android is really big. Also, tried touching the buttons on the phone but they didn’t do anything

I love the colour in this one, it looks really cool!

There was a bronze Android scuba statue on the other side of the campus. It had red LEDs on it, but they didn’t work (even when I wired up the battery in the back)

The wires:

This is one of the buildings, it looks pretty interesting!

There are flamingos trying to attack this T-rex!

He also gave me an ADK…

The accessory shield is really pretty @_@

The Google logo is silkscreened on there, in all those colours! Also, here you can see the joystick, three buttons, and three RGB LEDs

On this side there is a temperature sensor, light sensor, the golden Android is a capacitive touch sensor, three servo ports, and 2 relays!

On the back of the main board there is a QR code, and also ICP solder pads

Here is what the board looks like. There is also an Android etched into the chip The LEDs in the Android are just TX and RX

One thing about the Android Accessory shield is that the RGB LEDs are extremely bright!

This is what it looks like on the lowest setting aside from off

Retro also took me to a bunch of the electronics surplus stores in SV! WOW, there are so many of them with so much stuff. If something that you are making breaks or if you need a part, you can literally go to a real store and they will have the part. It is so cool! I made a video of everything that I bought. It is a little long, but if you want to watch it it is here:

Thanks for showing me Google and taking me to the electronics places retro!

On the last day I went to the San Mateo fair because I saw a tweet from @RoboGames that they would be there! It was nothing like the actual RoboGames or Maker Faire that are actually at the same place, but it was still really cool.

They had a swarm of Boe-bots! These are just a few of them!

I learnt some BASIC and programmed them up so that if one of the antenni are touched, then it backs up and turns right.

Zoom!

Also, there was one pink chassis and one blue one. It didn’t feel like it was spray painted though. I wonder how they dyed metal, or is that even possible?

There was also a Chevy Volt there

It was great seeing @MissySB from @RoboGames, and the intern too. WOW! I cannot wait for RoboGames next year, hopefully I will be able to make it!

Near my hotel there was a diner with absolutely amazing food. Take a look at this orange float!

This is a cool jukebox!

That pretty much wraps up this post. It was great meeting people. You can view more photos from Google, ADK, the bright ADK, San Mateo Fair, and Diner on flickr! Hope to see everyone again soon!

Posted in: Fun.

RoboGlyphs

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Lately, I have been trying to come up with ideas that would allow me to do a similar ‘gig’ as last year- when I was accepted to the Stanford program to learn AI.

Some may remember, some may not — some might not even know. Last year I was accepted into the Stanford University Education Program for Gifted Youth under the Artificial Intelligence program. Of course, it wasn’t very affordable. I created these Styrofoam vibrobots called Styrobots. Thanks to numerous efforts of the robotics community as a whole, we raised enough money for me to attend.

This year, I’m going to WWDC and RoboGames. I didn’t apply to any academic programs – aka the CMU Summer Robotics Institute & NASA’s Robotics Academy because they require US Citizenship, or something of the like.

WWDC and RoboGames are both in SF, CA, and around the same time period!

The idea I came up with are RoboGlyphs! They are small laser-etched ‘glyphs’ that can connect with other glyphs. The first three that I will be releasing are the 3 Laws of Robotics.

Here are some photos:

They look absolutely stunning in person!

However, this is not all that I plan to do with the RoboGlyphs. I plan to somehow attach a LED so that it can illuminate the words, so they can be seen in the dark.

I’m hoping to release these on Etsy around the first week of May. Keep an eye out!

Posted in: Art, Other, Projects.