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)

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!

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!

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.

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!

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!

The missing parts to the TECHNOROBOT kit that I got at the explOratorium during the Stanford EPGY AI Program in 2008 have been found! This robot has been transformed many times, the first as an idea/prototype for an emotional line following robot, then a snowplow, and now it will be an XBee messenger robot!

Refurbishing it was OK, it only took 4 hours. The only thing that was drastically broken was the drive axel. To fix it, I used some Lego axels.

The robot now uses an Arduino, and is powered off of USB. The motor is driven with the Adafruit Motor Shield (I plan to add more motors to the robot someday). The motor is powered from an Adafruit mintyboost.

I broadcasted the refurbishment to the Fat Man and Circuit Girl stream, AND took a photo every 5 seconds! You can see the HD timelapse on Vimeo!

The next steps for this robot is rather short:

• Make a battery pack for the Arduino
• Attach XBee
• Mount an ultrasonic sensor, program a simple behaviour
• Transmit messages, listen to messages

Can’t wait to blog more about it!

Oh yeah… if RobotShop reads my blog… thank you for sending all of the ridiculous amount of styrofoam squiggles. You could have used an insulated envelope, but no… squiggles! Hahahaha =)

Hopefully this will be MANOI’s last tune-up! Then I will have to start thinking about the battery… RoboGames is quickly approaching!! (Which means I’ll also have to start thinking about fundraising as well! (it won’t be too bad, about 1/2 the price of the Stanford trip I wager!))

One of the main flaws of MANOI was all of there servo connections… it just was not good!

The way I originally laid out the board was that one side would be for the legs, one side would be for the arms. I am still keeping it this way. This is what it looked like after the leg side was redone:

This is the arm side:

All in all, much more neat. I eliminated the clumsy extension cables that I had before. Look at how much nicer it is!

I am extremely pleased. I used one of the servo extensions for RX and Ground for the SSC-32. This way they won’t keep falling out and bending pins.

In my opinion, there is even room for an Arduino Pro Mini in there now, and MANOI would have hardly any bulk on its back. I did not test the servos yet, nor did I test the skating motions. (I had to go to class) I’m interested to see how the center of gravity changed.

Maybe putting an Arduino pro mini in there would be a good idea… and just have right-angle headers on it, with jumpers going to the wave shield. I think that would be efficient! Hmm!! Exciting!

The program evaluates the light the same way MANOI’s hockey stick did. Once it goes over a particular threshold, it will begin to spin its hat and start saying “HELLO!HELLO!HELLO!”.

At first, I wanted to make BB react to sound, so I dismantled a “haut-parleur” that I got a while ago, thinking that it was a piezo speaker. It’s actually not a piezo, because when I was looking at the analog readings on the Arduino, nothing happened if I fiddled with it. Weird!

When it says on the LCD that I’m at “cheel”, it is hardcoded in. I tried to use the script that downloads a feed, but it doesn’t work for me, for some reason. I commented below that post with my setup and questions. =)

Aah I can’t wait until my Femsapien arrives from the EPFL! It is super boring without a humanoid to work on.

I’m not exactly sure what the moral of this FNR is supposed to be… annoy me and face ‘teh ultimate’ BubbleBoy?! Hahahaha

I’ll add the video later in another post, Vimeo has a wait time of 130 minutes – and YouTube … well who knows about YouTube. o.O

I’m going to be working on an AI Library for Processing with a few people here at the COSI (hopefully). Expect many more posts about that! Woohuu! =)

That’s all for now. *turns lamp off*