Learning Pet – Thanks for voting!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 16th, 2011

Thanks everyone who voted for Learning Pet in the Open Hardware Summit Scholarship! It was much appreciated! We didn’t place in the top 3.

Here was a fantastic interview by Ian Cole, thanks so much Ian!

The future of Learning Pet is that there will be time spent on apps4arduino to make some money in order to be able to purchase some laser cut parts, 3d parts, and boards.

Here are some stats of the contest that I collected from the webpage:

- 51.9% had a prototype
- 48.1% showed a demo in their video
- 51.9% had a website
- 3.7% released their hardware files under a license for the open hardware definition
- 22.2% had their hardware files available
- 14.8% had a bom
- 5.6% released their source code under an osi license
- 22.2% had their code available
- 40.7% had documentation
- 22.2% had additional videos
- 59.3% said what they would do with the prize if they won
- 18.5% demoed while at the ohs

You can check out all the documentation for Learning Pet here:
http://robotgrrl.com/learningpet

Thanks again!

Learning Pet will be at the Maker Faire this weekend, so be sure to say hi! (or whatever hi is in robobrrd language)

Posted in: Android ADK, Projects, Robot.

R.I.P. Workshop – Final Day

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, July 15th, 2011

Today was the final day of building everything before all of our supplies and junk goes away. I can’t believe it is almost the end, and the robot has become very built over the past few days, but it still is not exactly how I want it.

I started off by doing some wiring! Found some yellow LEDs for the eyes, and Niklas is lending me his IR sensor!

Here is how the robot face looks with the LEDs and sensor on it. Its antennas are ends of serial cables!

The LEDs are mounted through the back of the face plate:

Sometime before making the arms, I sent a tweet out for name suggestions. @Kiteaton had a wonderful suggestion- “SCRUMBLEFLIT”, and it just sounds so perfect for this robot. It sounds like “what on earth is going on!” in robot language.

Here are the arms mounted on the stepper motors thanks to much hot glue!

The hand is made out of copper wire, with lots of solder, and the keys say “ROBOT”!

Inside of this can there are screws, to try to make noise. I chose Orange C plus for this because it is tasty and sounds like the programming language, C++.

Took some time to visit the place where I will be showing off SCRUMBLEFLIT, the town hall! It is a pretty decent town hall!

Afterwards I went back and worked with the LEDs for a bit. They are interesting because they cast light along the edge of the circle in the doorknob.

I created a blink that seems believable. I do it by quickly (but not too quickly) fading the LEDs to a low light, to signify the eyelid closing, then it jumps back to bright light, to signify the eye open. Blinking on robots is tricky, because if you don’t do it properly, it looks like as if it is glitching out.

After this, I was working on the arms again. Everything was going fine, the arms were moving, then everything stopped. The power supply wasn’t on anymore. As Niklas later taught me, what might have happened is an exposed wire might have touched the outside casing of the supply, making it go into shutdown mode. Apparently power supplies are really dangerous and can explode a lot. Hopefully it doesn’t make SCRUMBLEFLIT explode!

Anyway, I sort of got it working again a little while later, but the problem now is that it takes ages for the stepper motors to “warm up”. What happens is that everything is plugged in and working, but the steppers aren’t moving. However, if I take the power out of the steppers and plug it back in, you can hear and see it react to the voltage, but it doesn’t keep moving. This has happened before in the previous days, still unsure about what is causing it though. It usually goes away by itself, but when it doesn’t, it is really annoying.

We will see what happens tomorrow. I have to wake up early and move my robot from one place to another since it is in the studio right now, so hopefully it isn’t raining then! Tomorrow will have a lot of explaining about what the robot COULD have done and what it SHOULD do. I enjoy talking about robotics nevertheless though.

Everyone’s projects are absolutely stunning! We created so much in a short amount of time, with unplanned materials. Creativity has some amazing super powers!

Here is a video of the robot’s eyes blinking!

Posted in: R.I.P. Banff.

Adafruit + RobotGrrl Team Up

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Adafruit Industries and RobotGrrl are teaming together to unleash a super build-a-long robot video series!

The idea is to have a video each week about robotics. The best way to learn about robotics is to dive in head first, so we will be making a sociable bird robot out of popsicle sticks, coffee sticks, hot glue, and electronics from Adafruit.

The videos will serve as a great way to become introduced to the various aspects that are involved with the construction of robots. The exciting part about this is that the robot is not a “traditional” metal and wheels robot. Not all robots have to be made out of metal, and they don’t always have to have wheels. They have to be able to sense and react to their environment.

We’ll be delving into this more in the videos, but here are some teaser photos of prototypes of the bird robot…

All of the files and software that will be used in the making of the robot will be open source too.

There is one teeny tiny problem though… this robot doesn’t have a name! WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT!?!? Leave a comment here (or anywhere I will notice it) with a cool name suggestion. If yours is the coolest, it will be chosen!

Thanks very much to Adafruit Industries for funding parts for the robot and the the opportunity!

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

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Lab of Misfit Robots!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

This past Friday, for Friday Night Robotics, I bought a Zhu Zhu pet. It’s actually a Kung Zhu, but it’s really the same thing. I figured it would be cool to hack it. Once I started hacking it even more in my cozy lab while sipping some candy cane hot cocoa, a great idea came to me! This could be a series on my blog!

Coming soon there will be videos of hacks on some of the robot toys I have around. These include…

Kung Zhu! A cute little hamster appropriately named Rivet, perfect platform to maybe control the wheels and drive around!

Furby! A hacked Furby that a friend and I at COSI were working on.

Femisapien! This was a robot from the Robots Podcast, and it is begging for a hack!

NXT! Probably won’t be doing much to this, but we will be looking at the insides!

R2D2! Check out the insides of this awesome robot!

It will be super fantastic, with lots of photos and videos. It will be a great way to share some of the hacking experiences I had, the easy, hard, and broken parts, with you.

Posted in: Lab of Misfit Robots, Projects.

FNR – Robot Mesh Network: Communication Board

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, November 22nd, 2010

Trying to get two boards to talk to each other is tricky. For my robot mesh network project, I’m winging it with my own communication protocol through serial. There really isn’t any fancy protocol yet, just bare bone messages being sent.

The messages are sent from a UART, and received by a NewSoftSerial implementation. I had a hard time trying to get anything being sent from a NewSoftSerial to be received by NewSoftSerial. Once I finally realized this, it started to come together.

Here is a video explaining the success that I finally had, it was so amazing!

I will be blogging more about this later, with extended details of the problems that I ran into, and how I overcame them. Right now I am trying to make my Macbook triple boot. If you haven’t done it before, it’s a long trial and error process! I also started mentoring some FIRST teams in Montreal! The build season is quickly approaching! Woot!

Posted in: Other, Projects, Robot.

Hockey MANOI

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

FNR – Robot Mesh Network: Intro & Node 1

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, September 19th, 2010

I’m trying to create a network for my robots to communicate through and interact with the outside world to have some new behaviours emerge. Each robot will be able to read and transmit messages. The robots will be given basic instructions for things to listen to and eventually some behavioural AI to link previous commands together. The idea is to have robots talking to each other, informing one another of different sensor readings, thereby creating a shared knowledge of the environment that the robots are in.

In a military robots example, a UAV could be observing the environment below and an autonomous rover analyzing some LIDAR sensor data of its ahead of it. With some mapping algorithms applied and communication between the two robots, a rescue mission could be planned and executed very quickly. It’s all about networking the robots and making them talk together in “words” they understand.

Last Friday I worked on getting Twitter integrated with Processing. This weekend I added on to that existing work by trimming down the tweet string, and having it transmitted to an Arduino which broadcasted the message through the XBee to the other devices.

There are currently three devices on the network right now:
Node 0: Transmitter from the computer
Node 1: RoboGlyphs
and a Watchdog, which doesn’t transfer data, only reads what is being sent out.

Here is a video of a broad and basic explanation of everything so far:

The transmitter node serves as the main point of communication of the internet to the devices, and vice versa. It’s using an Arduino with an XBee attached to it. Right now its main purpose is to send out the tweet that it receives from the Processing sketch.

The transmitter node looks like this:

Which is attached to the computer running a Processing sketch:

The Processing sketch is connected to Twitter, and searches for tweets that are to @RobotGrrlsBots. The connection is through OAuth, since IP rate limiting for feeds resets less often, as far as I have observed. It sends the most recent tweet to the transmitter node.

The RoboGlyph node receives the tweet, and does what the command says. The command has to be formatted in the way of this:

If it is received OK, which is usually is, then it will display it! The process that the RoboGlyphs follow is that it fades in the colours, then it waits for a command. Once it receives a command, the colours will fade out.

This is what the RoboGlyphs node looks like:

And this is it working!

Pretty cool. The RoboGlyphs could use a tune up though by using one of the TLC594 16 bit PWM out chips. Right now the green LEDs don’t use PWM, so it makes the animation look choppy.

The Watchdog watches all of the data that is being transmitted and shows it on the screen. This is what it looks like:

It’s useful to try to debug some things. While making everything I was having trouble with the New Soft Serial library and Arduino 0019.

Next time I will be working on getting data transported back from the RoboGlyphs and sending a tweet. From there, it will be about adapting that code to all of the other robots too. This is just the start!

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

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.