RobotGrrl.com » table http://robotgrrl.com/blog ethical robots that bring smiles Mon, 21 May 2012 21:27:49 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 RoboGames Recap http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2012/04/30/robogames-recap/ http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2012/04/30/robogames-recap/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:24:40 +0000 Erin, the RobotGrrl http://robotgrrl.com/blog/?p=2410 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!

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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!

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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!

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

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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!

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

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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!

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

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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.

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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!

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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!

]]> http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2012/04/30/robogames-recap/feed/ 0 Friday Night Robotics – Portable… Fish.. Tank… Robot… ??? http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2009/11/15/friday-night-robotics-portable-fish-tank-robot/ http://robotgrrl.com/blog/2009/11/15/friday-night-robotics-portable-fish-tank-robot/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:44:07 +0000 Erin, the RobotGrrl http://robotgrrl.com/blog/?p=1456 This FNR I continued work on the blinky blink NXT LED fish! I added wheels to it, sensors, and the NXT brick. Basically, this now makes it a ‘portable fish tank robot’!

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The idea stemmed from the want to make a robot that can drive around on a table but not fall off. In particular, the table would be the table for the Autonomous Robotics Club at the admissions open house activity fair ^_^

Ultrasonic sensors are usually the best for this, since it depends on distance. Though, one could easily make a mechanism to trigger a touch sensor… or one could use a light sensor, but there is more possibility for error with a light sensor.

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The design right now has the ultrasonic sensor sticking out more that that, since it wasn’t far enough out… this means that sometimes the NXT couldn’t tell the motors to stop in time, and it would fall off the table.

The motors are geared to be fast, since I want it to be fast like a fish!

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The screen displays the ‘water level’ for the LED fish. In the picture, it used a method of drawing the level line by line, but I later refined it so that it uses a rectangle, and increments 3 pixels more so that it’s noticable when one presses the button.

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The robot can zip around pretty quickly, which produces some interesting artsy stuff:

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The LED fish are on the back of the robot, and the speed of their blinks is determined by how much ‘food’ they have. The more food, the more fast it is, the less food, the slower it is. When you press the button to feed the fish, it makes a bloop sound :P

Portable Fish Tank Robot

The LED fish is what makes this project. No one can resist the power of super-cute LED fish. They’re just so happy! :)

Here’s a video of the robot in action. It’s running the old program, but it’s all pretty much the same thing :)

The code for this is pretty cool. The NXT can handle up to 10 different simultaneous tasks! I use this to check the sensors for food and water, drive the robot, and blink the LED fish at the same time. Now, I’m still experimenting with the code, which is why there are bugs, random functions, and no comments in it.

  1. #pragma config(Sensor, S1,     HTPB,                sensorI2CCustom9V)
  2. #pragma config(Sensor, S2,     sonicSensor,         sensorSONAR)
  3. #pragma config(Sensor, S3,     touchSensor1,         sensorTouch)
  4. #pragma config(Sensor, S4,     touchSensor2,         sensorTouch)
  5. //*!!Code automatically generated by ‘ROBOTC’ configuration wizard               !!*//
  6.  
  7. /*
  8.   Crazy LEDs!
  9.   Erin K
  10.   Oct. 9th, 2009
  11. */
  12.  
  13. #include "drivers/common.h"
  14. #include "drivers/HTPB-driver.h"
  15.  
  16. byte theLEDs[] = { 0×01, 0×02, 0×04, 0×08, 0×10, 0×20 };
  17. int theTime = 50;
  18. int theWaterLevel = 32;
  19. int foodButton = 0;
  20. int waterButton = 0;
  21. int averageTouch1Level = 0;
  22. int averageTouch2Level = 0;
  23.  
  24. void fishTank(int theTime);
  25. void drawWaterLevel();
  26. void doSomething();
  27.  
  28. task blinkFish() {
  29.   while(true) {
  30.     fishTank(theTime);
  31.   }
  32. }
  33.  
  34. task checkFoodSensor() {
  35.  
  36.   while(true) {
  37.  
  38.     if(SensorValue(touchSensor1) == 1) {
  39.       theTime-=10; // Make fish faster
  40.       PlaySoundFile("bloop4.rso");
  41.       wait1Msec(1000);
  42.     }
  43.  
  44.   }
  45.  
  46. }
  47.  
  48. task checkWaterSensor() {
  49.  
  50.   while(true) {
  51.  
  52.     if(SensorValue(touchSensor2) == 1) {
  53.       theWaterLevel+=3; // Add water
  54.       PlaySoundFile("waterSPLASH.rso");
  55.       wait1Msec(1000);
  56.     }
  57.  
  58.   }
  59.  
  60. }
  61.  
  62. task drainWaterAndFood() {
  63.  
  64.   while(true) {
  65.  
  66.     wait1Msec(5000); // Wait 10 seconds
  67.     theTime += 10; // Make fish slower
  68.     theWaterLevel -= 2; // Drain water
  69.  
  70.   }
  71.  
  72. }
  73.  
  74. void drawWaterLevel() {
  75.   eraseDisplay();
  76.   nxtFillRect(0, theWaterLevel, 99, 0);
  77. }
  78.  
  79. task main() {
  80.  
  81.   // Setup all the digital IO ports as outputs (0xFF)
  82.   if (!HTPBsetupIO(HTPB, 0xFF)) StopAllTasks();
  83.   wait1Msec(200);
  84.  
  85.   eraseDisplay();
  86.   drawWaterLevel();
  87.  
  88.   float averageSonicLevel = 0;
  89.  
  90.   for(int i=0; i<5; i++) {
  91.    averageSonicLevel += SensorValue(sonicSensor);
  92.    wait1Msec(500);
  93.   }
  94.  
  95.   averageSonicLevel /= 5;
  96.  
  97.   StartTask(blinkFish);
  98.   StartTask(checkFoodSensor);
  99.   StartTask(checkWaterSensor);
  100.   StartTask(drainWaterAndFood);
  101.  
  102.   float sonicThresh = 10.0;
  103.  
  104.   bool driveMotors = false;
  105.  
  106.   while(true) {
  107.  
  108.     if((SensorValue(sonicSensor) > (averageSonicLevel-sonicThresh) || SensorValue(sonicSensor) < (averageSonicLevel+sonicThresh))) {
  109.  
  110.     doSomething();
  111.  
  112.     } else {
  113.      motor[motorB] = -40;
  114.      motor[motorC] = -40;
  115.      wait1Msec(1000);
  116.     }
  117.  
  118.     drawWaterLevel();
  119.     alive();
  120.  
  121.   }
  122.  
  123. }
  124.  
  125.  
  126. int doSomethingIterations = 0;
  127.  
  128. void doSomething() {
  129.  
  130.   doSomethingIterations++;
  131.  
  132.   motor[motorB] = 40;
  133.   motor[motorC] = 40;
  134.  
  135.   wait1Msec(100);
  136.  
  137. }
  138.  
  139.  
  140. void fishTank(int theTime) {
  141.  
  142.     // LEDs going up
  143.     for(int i=0; i<6; i++) {
  144.       if (!HTPBwriteIO(HTPB, theLEDs[i])) nxtDisplayTextLine(5, "ERR WRITE");
  145.       wait1Msec(theTime);
  146.     }
  147.  
  148.     // LEDs going down
  149.     for(int i=5; i>=0; i–) {
  150.       if (!HTPBwriteIO(HTPB, theLEDs[i])) nxtDisplayTextLine(5, "ERR WRITE");
  151.       wait1Msec(theTime);
  152.     }
  153.  
  154. }

Eventually, I want to have the robot able to drive around in a square (a big square) autonomously. The square is around one of the dorm buildings, so there’s brick walls, stairs, fences, and people to avoid. I think it would be cool because the square is just so confusing at first. You can walk around it 5 times, and still think that you have gone somewhere.

Since a lot of smart people do this, if a robot does it we could imply that it is smart! Bahaha! Logic prevails!

I mentioned that this was originally intended for the activities fair. I also had MANOI there, doing its handshake routine! It went really good. We had a good 15 people show interest, which is surprisingly more than the orchestra, and the tables adjacent to ARC.

But, the table got hit by a frisbee. (Yes, my robot got hit by a frisbee) So, thanks to the jerks at the frisbee club, they messed up MANOI’s other knee (the good one– or what was the good one). So now MANOI has two bad knees, and can’t walk. The goal that I just obtained got wrecked. By a frisbee. Frisbee sucks, really bad.

(so, don’t join frisbee club, they’re morons)

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