Adafruit HQ Fun

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

Woohoooo! I finally had the opportunity to visit Adafruit HQ! Back on Sunday October 21, 2007 was when I ordered my first Arduino Duemilanove from them, and then later became actually interested in electronics! Their tutorials have helped me along the way, so it was totally a blast to go there and see them in human form again, check out their pick and place machine, say hello to the Adabot character, and learn even more!

The Adabot puppet is really interesting. It is fabulous looking in real life. With Adabot, they are taking the approach that robots are friends, which is really nice! Just like RoboBrrd! They can both be friends!

The pick and place machine… wowza, I was amazed to see it in person. Think of all the technical details that have to go in to a machine like this! Vision, programming, mechanical! There are trays and reels from which it can take the parts from. It places the pieces on the board from checking on its vision system. Plus, it even knows when it drops a component. Not only all of this, but your circuit creations can be functional in seconds rather than hours of soldering. It’s just wicked!

RoboBrrd wants a pick and placed brain some day…

ladyada is an inspiration, and the pick and place machine is stellar!

After the tour was done, they let me choose stickers! I kind of went out of control, but check out how great the RoboBrrd travelling case looks now! Thanks for the stickers Adafruit

In return for the visit, I said I would make some sort of Adabot head with servos. I’m probably going to revise this idea into some sort of goofy project enclosure to hide your Arduino project in, and it will also have servos for the antennas. Well, more on this later since there’s a lot of pre-existing work to get done before a next project.

Hackerspace passport was STAMPED!

Thanks Adafruit for the tour! It was a blast!

Posted in: Fun, Maker Faire, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

RoboBrrd at Maker Faire Montreal

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, August 25th, 2012

Through a change in events, we will be at Montreal Mini Maker Faire! Be sure to check out the table with all the RoboBrrds, it will have a green table cloth at lots of cool robots!

Also be sure to check out the Spikenzie Labs learn to solder area, you get to make a really sweet badge!

I’ve made some hand-made cards for anyone who wants them! So be sure to come by and grab one Now I have to go and prepare all my robots! Hope to see everyone there and…

Get excited and MAKE THINGS!

Posted in: Fun, Maker Faire.

RoboBrrd at Maker Faire 2012!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, May 18th, 2012

We are located in Expo Hall in the corner down near the back! We have a lime green tablecloth and RoboBrrds, it will be hard to miss.

Come and see our newest RoboBrrd! LightningBrrd aka RC/DC aka Sparky Sparrow!

FireBrrd will be there!

WIN AN EXCLUSIVE ROBOBRRD!

Take a picture of you and RoboBrrd at our table and tweet it to @RobotGrrl with the #makerfaire hashtag, and be entered to WIN an exclusive prototype of RoboBrrd kit version when it is ready!

Hope to see you at Maker Faire Bay Area 2012!

Posted in: Fun, Maker Faire.

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!

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.

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.

World’s Maker Faire NYC 2011!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, September 25th, 2011

Maker Faire NYC was great! We showed off four of my robots, Learning Pet, DOGCOW, RoboBrrd, and MANOI!

We were located at the Robot Square which turned out to be a really great location!

By far the most popular was RoboBrrd Food! It was so crazy. The kids kept feeding the RoboBrrd constantly, they wouldn’t stop! And if they had to stop, sometimes they would start to cry or whine to their parents. It was great! It was funny to see how the younger kids understood what to do right away, when the older ones didn’t really know. As for the adults, you had to tell them to try feeding the RoboBrrd, they never did it automatically haha! Here is a video of RoboBrrd food in action, thanks to VayaConQueso!

You can learn more about RoboBrrd Food by reading the blog post, watching the video and looking at the source code!

Learning Pet was a close second to the most favourite robot. It was great to see everyone interacting with it. Some of the kids played right through from level 1 to 5, so they could see the super duper Learning Pet victory dance celebration!

Here’s a video explaining Learning Pet thanks to the NY Hall of Science:

You can learn more about Learning Pet in my Open Hardware Summit blog post, through this video, and on its website!

As for MANOI the hockey playing humanoid robot, most of the time its battery was running out! So lame! MANOI was always pretty much sitting down, like in this photo:

However, MANOI did appear at the 0:21 mark in the Engadget show. It was pretty crazy when they were filming, they were super professional, and no one knew they were from Engadget!

You can watch the Engadget show here!

To learn more about hockey MANOI, you can explore the MANOI tag and watch this video!

One of the favourite things was explaining everything to all the people. It’s fun to see their reactions and what they think of the projects. Plus, since there are so many people, what you say each time becomes more fine tuned!

Meeting people at the Maker Faire is great! Here is me with lots of Propeller boards with Jessica from the Parallax videos!

Check out all of the stuff that I brought home! I’m super excited to use all of this!

Some notables include:
- Tons of XBees YAY
- seeedstudio ADK kit WOOT
- Parallax!!!!!
- netduino, pulse sensor, white lol shield, shapelock, tshirt (bought these )
- Maker Passport (a repurposed Hackerspace passport) with lots of cool signatures in it! AWESOME!

I also managed to see Arc Attack for the first time in person ever! It is super cool, definitely recommend it! The sound seems so much clearer than anything else. The blue shining in from the glass was really amazing too, and all of the waves in the wall. I waited in line with a friend from university, Matt Krass, and his friends so it was pretty awesome. (I then forgot to say bye as I left, DOH! Was in a rush to get back to my robots!)

At the end of the Maker Faire, there were these blue ribbons being given out, and everyone I asked had no idea what they were. I asked the guy giving them out, and he said that they are *only* for awesome projects. To be honest, I got a little upset at this (my projects aren’t awesome?! whaaat?!), but he was kind enough to visit my table and hear me explain all my projects!

Here’s a video of me explaining ALL of the robots thanks to Chris Connors:

And then after that, he awarded me his very last Maker Faire Editors Choice award! Wow! Yay! Thanks again, Chris!

The trek back home was interesting! My parents drove down to bring me back. The fog in the Adirondacks at night is intense! We slept in a Walmart parking lot too I was super tired the whole time, falling asleep a lot.

Afterwards, my robots were featured on MAKE! What a super honour! Gareth is a pretty cool person, next Maker Faire we are definitely going to make some BEAM robots!

There were some people that I didn’t get a chance to meet, hopefully next time there will be that chance! Special thanks to Jonah and Katherine for letting me sleep on their (very nice) couch for OHS and Maker Faire! Thanks to everyone who made the Maker Faire NYC 2011 so much fun! It was a pleasure meeting everyone who came by the table, and hope to see you all next year!

Posted in: Fun.

Vote for next Robot Party theme!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, August 25th, 2011

The Robot Party is tonight! The theme is dancing II, so we can improve on ideas from last week, and just have a crazy collaborative robot dance party again!

Last week we had 1337 (the Nao!) doing an AC/DC dance from Carlos and Jerry’s Eggbot doing a Sierpinski-esque drawing dance. There was also econoSpazzi by ignoblegnome. It was super cool to have everyone’s robots dancing at once!

You can join the Robot Party hangout on Google+ just watch RobotGrrl’s stream for when a hangout is started. The party is every Thursday at 8PM ET!

If you don’t have a robot or anything interesting to show, then you can watch the mirror of the hangout on Ustream, and hangout in the #fmcg irc.freenode.net channel!

And now for the question! You can vote for 3 options! The poll will close on the 28th, so we will all have time to prepare a brainstorm/idea or robot for Sept. 1. We can improve on our ideas and implement them in our robots for Sept. 8th!

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See you at the party!

Posted in: Robot Party.