RoboBrrd Building Video 1

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, November 27th, 2011

There was a lot of footage taken during the build of the latest RoboBrrd. Here is the first of these videos, there’s going to be a little over 10 in total!

Hope you enjoy the video, the series of videos will be a great companion to the Instructable. More of the documentation will be arriving online as we sort through it!

I started learning Eagle last week, it was quick to jump in and get started learning. There’s also lots of cool parts libraries out there with Arduinos or other various components that you would need.

Here’s me learning Eagle:

Here’s where the circuit is at right now. Have to add in the headers and such, and place it on the proto-screw shield!

More later!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

RoboBrrd Documentation!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, May 22nd, 2011

The written documentation for how to build a RoboBrrd is on Make Projects! I had to get it done for the Make Bots with Character contest, competition is always a really powerful motivator for me.

I put a huge effort into the drawings to get them done before the deadline (drew each image myself). Here’s one of my favourite drawings from the bunch:

I was fortunate enough to have some good weather and tulips to take some decent photos of RoboBrrd:

Also created a summary video of RoboBrrd’s behaviours:

Considering how bad shape RoboBrrd was ONE week ago, it is amazing that it has come this far and this short amount of time. Last week there were problems with the LEDs, the communication between the boards, sometimes the motors didn’t work, the beak was loose, it was a big mess. Trying to fix the LEDs turned out being a huge ordeal.

The contest feels like it can go either way. I mainly want to spread the word about RoboBrrd, and being in the real Make magazine would accomplish that. I think RoboBrrd could inspire a lot of youth to take a stab at DIY robotics, instead of from kits and with stuff that they don’t have around their house (everyone has popsicle sticks and pencils, RoboBrrd is really accessible). It would be nice to see a flock of RoboBrrds at a Maker Faire one day MWUHAHAHA!

RoboBrrd was shown on Ask an Engineer last night! It was really cool, I’m uber humbled

All that is left now for RoboBrrd is more video tutorials and documentation! I’m going to challenge myself to get them all done this week, it will be interesting to see if I can accomplish the challenge! :O

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Robot Mesh Network: RoboBrrd and MANOI AGAIN!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, May 14th, 2011

After getting the initial communication between RoboBrrd and MANOI working, I went and fixed some things and added new commands. There are still some aspects that are iffy about the communication, mainly due to timing and the part that there are at least 8 places where if something doesn’t work at the right time frame, then the whole process won’t work. With communicating information without many handshakes and checksums, it is known to not work all of the time.

I made a new video about RoboBrrd and MANOI with the commands. I like the angle used for the robots in this video, it portrays the social cue that they are talking to eachother, which they are, but in their own robotic-mesh way. :3

View it on YouTube.

RoboBrrd now has passive behaviours, which turned out to be really cute and fun. I love how passive behaviours always add so much more depth to the robot. Only problem is the sequential and timing aspect of them, sometimes they override the sensors. Also, the gurgling of the speaker can probably be fixed with a capacitor and resistor. I moved the speaker to the main board from the communication board because it wouldn’t work all of the time. It was really fishy. :/

Last week I worked really hard on RoboBrrd to try and finish something (anything!- just trying to make it work!) for the MAKE: Bots With Character contest. One night I stayed up really late trying to debug the TLC5940 PWM shift out circuit. The next day I ended up scrapping it and just using the Arduino MEGA’s PWM outputs (there are a lot of them!).

Luckily, the contest was pushed back, so I have more time to write the written tutorial. The written tutorial is getting pretty long, it is quite surprising!

The second bio-inspiration video and the design video will be next on the line. Also going to make a character overview of RoboBrrd for the contest.

I am crazy for this contest because I live, eat, breathe social robotics, and having character in your robot is an important part of that and so many people forget about it! I want to show the whole world what it would be like if robots were their own sentient species! I want to be able to get people to make their own interactive robots so that they can experiment too! It is all so super exciting with so many exclamation points!!!!!!!!

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd, MANOI, Projects, Robot.

Robot Mesh Network: RoboBrrd and MANOI

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

The robot mesh network finally worked last night! Whenever the PIR sensor on RoboBrrd was triggered, MANOI would do a BAJNGL (both arm jingle) move. Here’s a video, there’s even live debugging in the video because there were some loose wires on MANOI’s SSC-32 that weren’t there when I tested everything (of course) bahaha:

View the video on YouTube.

The code can be found on Github.

There are other posts on the tag robot mesh network that you can look at if you want other videos on how they work on the mesh network

Here are some randomly ordered thoughts:
- Doesn’t use XBee API mode, because I could never make it work
- Not sure why RoboBrrd’s eyes weren’t blinking :S They do blink when I power the Arduino UNO (Communication board) instead of the Arduino MEGA (Main board).
- Need to make MANOI’s communication board loop a bit more fast & optimal
- RoboBrrd’s beak looked funny because the popsicle stick bindings are all loose
- RoboBrrd’s base needs to be painted
- YodaBot needs to get its wiring redone for inter-board communication
- The bugs I encountered were:
-> An interrupt pin that was triggered whenever touching the wire. Fixed by changing the Arduino. (This one tripped me up for two days, it was extremely tricky to debug)
-> XBee couldn’t send out. FIxed by swapping the XBee.
-> NO TX/RX BUGS FOR ONCE! YAY!

I hope to link together more behaviours between MANOI and RoboBrrd! Networking the robots together is amazingly fun ^^, and it lets me do something that I’ve always wanted to do, let robots communicate with each other. It will be interesting to see what can happen when we add Yoda Bot into the mesh

You’ll be hearing more about RoboBrrd as I’m going to try to enter it into the MAKE Bots with Character contest! Yay!

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

Posted in: Programming, Projects, Robot.

RoboBrrd: Bio-Inspiration Overview!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011

Bio-inspiration in robotics is often under-rated, despite its importance. For domestic and social robots, we want to make sure that we start off with something that will seem familiar. This will be the key to easing us in to having sociable robots in our homes in the future. Bio-inspiration to the rescue!

RoboBrrd takes its bio-inspiration from birds, as the name suggests. In this week’s video we discuss bio-inspiration and introduce the aspects that RoboBrrd will borrow from its nature counterparts: Beak, wings, sound, light sensors, motion sensor, and software!

Or you can view it on YouTube.

The next video will discuss these aspects in depth! Keep chirping.

Also, thanks to Adafruit Industries for sponsoring the electronics!~!~!

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

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.

Stwutter Introduction

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, April 18th, 2011

Here’s a video of a Mac Application that I have been working on. It is Twitter + speech. The tweets speak to you, and you can speak back at the tweets. I’ll post an update when Stwutter is available for everyone! In the meantime, enjoy the video:

Or you can view it on YouTube.

Posted in: Mac, Projects.

RoboBrrd: Three Bad Things

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Saturday, April 9th, 2011

I like to think of robotics as the art of trying to accomplish something despite the numerous things that don’t work. Last week, before heading off to GTR, I made an effort to try to get a RoboBrrd video done. It didn’t happen, because there was a crazy number of things that didn’t work.

I tried to use the TLC5940 chip that also controls RoboBrrd’s eyes to control the servos. It was hard to set up because there had to be many short wires attached to places that already had a lot of wires attached. I used two LiPo’s in series as the battery, for a total of 7.4V. Some of the servos were working, some were acting funny. I added in a 10uF capacitor to see if filtering the voltage would help. One of the servos stopped working… I wondered why, and read the product’s specs (this is probably best done BEFORE you start to do anything with the product). They are only rated for 6V!

The TLC5940 was sloppy at controlling the servos anyway, so I decided to go with the servo library. At this point, I also needed a voltage regulator to bring down the voltage to 5V. I got the LM317, and prototyped it on a breadboard first. It seemed to work okay, so I soldered it onto the protoboard. Once I plugged in a servo, the voltage would drop down to 2V, and the servo wouldn’t move. After much help with the kind people in irc.freenode.net#fmcg, we deduced that I used the wrong pinout for the plastic package. See, the old guy at the electronics store printed out the first page of the LM317 datasheet and kindly drew on it the pinout. The pinout he gave was wrong.

Once the LM317 issue was fixed, it was getting extremely hot. This was quickly and easily fixed with a giant heatsink.

The final issue was encountered during the Robot Party on Thursday. There’s some sort of conflict between the TLC5940 library and the servo library. On the higher level, the Tlc.init() function is causing the problem. I haven’t looked into the lower level causes of it yet. Has anyone else had this problem?

The RoboBrrd videos have to start rolling, so I decided to throw in another Arduino to quickly fix the issue. It would be great to find a better solution, though.

You can see the video LIVE on Ask an Engineer tonight! Woohoo!

Or, you can watch it here:

There is still a lot of stuff that I have to do, but we’re at a good place now to start the videos. Here’s a list:
- Add in sensor functionality to RoboBrrd
- Make the base able to move
- Cover the other panels with green felt
- Decorate the base
- Make RoboBrrd #2 so #1 can interact with it (so it won’t be lonely)

When the videos get rolling, that’s when more of the DIY posts will start showing up!

There are a bunch of new photos in the RoboBrrd collection for your viewing pleasure!

This is a really exciting robot, and thanks again to Adafruit for sponsoring all of the electronics. Woot woop!

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

Posted in: Adafruit RoboBrrd.