Friday Night Robotics – Plain Vanilla

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, January 18th, 2009

At first, the title of this post was “Mediocre at Best”, but after I typed it all up, I realized that I did do stuff that makes it a little bit better than mediocre! So, I switched it to “Plain Vanilla”. There really isn’t much stuff to do when I don’t have MANOI around!

I started a new project thingy where it is an extremely simple game of pong. The paddles are stationary, but the trick is that one paddle would be controlled by the computer (in this case- an Arduino), and the other would be controlled by the human with a Wii Nunchuck.

The paddles are represented by tiny pink LEDs, and the ball is represented by the LEDs in between them.

There is one LED at the top that is used to signal the start of a new game, and/or a goal.

Since the human player would be using a nunchuck, it would sort of be like Dance-Dance-Revolution where you would have to tilt it a particular way to have the paddle show up. For this, I’m going to use BubbleBoy’s LCD screen:

It will also be able to display the score! ^_^

I got a little bored of doing this due to numerous conflicting errors when I compiled the code, so I switched to my snowplow robot.

I remember having trouble trying to get the two motors to move with this one, so my main goal was to debug it. It turns out that one of the tab thingys on the DC motor was loose!

I had to snap the robot in half in order to transport it, so now the snowplow is waaay too top heavy =) It’s kind of funny!

I really can’t wait to get my Femsapien that I won from the Robots Podcast contest. I’ll play around with it a bit, then I will hack it and put an Arduino in it! One of the things I really want to do is to try making it Twitter. Since I don’t have an ethernet shield, I would probably have the robot (Arduino) send a variable to Processing, which would then twitter, probably using something like this.

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics – Snowed Out!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, December 12th, 2008

Well, this FNR I really did not do much, so I figured I could blog about the snowplow robot I’ve been working on.

It’s basically the line following robot I started at Stanford. It has a gearbox, which is held in place with a micro servo, so it can turn and stuff. On top of the gearbox is another micro servo to lift the snowplow. All of the wheels are from lego…

The micro servo doesn’t lift the plow in reality, but I wanted to see if it could. Hahahaha! I bought a Futaba servo, which is 4x bigger than a micro servo, so it should work.

The snowplow is going to be pretty simple once I waterproof it all, it will just push snow. The grey part you see on the bottom of the plow are XACTO knife blades, so it can cut through the snow. ^_^

While making this, an idea of a roomba-like snowblower came to my mind. But, a robot snowblower would be too dangerous. To set the scale, I’m thinking about a robot that would be around 30cm tall, 20cm long, 20cm wide. If some of us can barely operate snowblowers SAFELY… what makes anyone think that our stupidity would decrease if we were given less control? I could just see some bozo leaving an autonomous snowblower clear the driveway when a few people are walking along and… well, you get the point. It’s too dangerous, you would have to have so many sensors on it to ensure safety, and even then it’s not guaranteed.

All of this snow is bogging down the blogging! Snowplow robot to the rescue! :->

Posted in: Projects, Robot.