27 hours left! & RoboBrrd Dashboard Beta!

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

There are only 27 hours left for you to support RoboBrrd on Indiegogo! It’s the final countdown! Check it out here!

As you might have seen in the teaser video from last week, we were working on an application called RoboBrrd Dashboard. Now, it is available as Beta 1! Check out the video overview:

This was made entirely in Processing with controlP5. It was quite straight forward to code it, the things that took the most time were in the details, like positioning, colours, and buttons. It also writes to an xml file, to save your current theme and servo positions. Handy!

Here is a screenshot:

RoboBrrd enjoys being calibrated with RoboBrrd Dashboard!

You can download it over at robobrrd.com/dashboard! It’s open source, check out the Github repo!

This is version Beta 1, so let us know if you find any bugs so that we can fix them

Help spread the word of RoboBrrd on Indiegogo and share the inspiration of robotics! Thanks!

Posted in: apps4arduino, Programming, Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

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: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

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: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

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: MANOI, Projects, RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!), 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: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

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.