Adafruit + RobotGrrl Team Up

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Adafruit Industries and RobotGrrl are teaming together to unleash a super build-a-long robot video series!

The idea is to have a video each week about robotics. The best way to learn about robotics is to dive in head first, so we will be making a sociable bird robot out of popsicle sticks, coffee sticks, hot glue, and electronics from Adafruit.

The videos will serve as a great way to become introduced to the various aspects that are involved with the construction of robots. The exciting part about this is that the robot is not a “traditional” metal and wheels robot. Not all robots have to be made out of metal, and they don’t always have to have wheels. They have to be able to sense and react to their environment.

We’ll be delving into this more in the videos, but here are some teaser photos of prototypes of the bird robot…

All of the files and software that will be used in the making of the robot will be open source too.

There is one teeny tiny problem though… this robot doesn’t have a name! WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT!?!? Leave a comment here (or anywhere I will notice it) with a cool name suggestion. If yours is the coolest, it will be chosen!

Thanks very much to Adafruit Industries for funding parts for the robot and the the opportunity!

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

Posted in: RoboBrrd (thx Adafruit!).

Friday Night Robotics – Yoda Bot Extender Shield and R2D2

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, August 20th, 2010

Y O D A ! This Friday Night Robotics I added an extra shield to the Rampage Robot, aka Yoda Bot. BUT I also did some other random things during this week. No computers though, all hardware this week.

The plan is to take this stackable robot design, and actually add a layer to it!

From the shield extending headers that I received from Krafter’s big box and some protoboard that I have hanging around, this should be a pretty simple task. This is the finished product!

Not sure about the center of gravity with Yoda sort of hanging off the back of the robot. This will probably have to be tested. It would be nice if it is offset from the center just enough to produce some cool wheelies!

Some other things that I did that week were…

Bought some rechargeable D cell batteries for Artoo!

The amount of detail that was put in to this robot toy is so amazing, it’s really cool. Check out the sparkly gold “wires” on its feet!

When I eventually hack Artoo, I’m going to do it by splicing the wires, because I still want the “original” Artoo to be operational. Check out Artoo wearing my NASA JPL cap!

Here’s a video of some of the things that Artoo can do already:

Testing Out R2D2 from RobotGrrl on Vimeo.

The next thing that I did was paint the Lego for the RoboGlyphs stand to be conductive. This is using the conductive paint that Krafter sent in the big box!

The paint smells really bad, I highly recommend painting it outside.

For the second coat, I did indeed paint it outside:

That’s about it. It dried, but I’m a little worried about the cracks between the bricks. I’ll measure the resistance with an Ohm Meter next time to see if it is continuous!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Refurbishing Robot

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010

The missing parts to the TECHNOROBOT kit that I got at the explOratorium during the Stanford EPGY AI Program in 2008 have been found! This robot has been transformed many times, the first as an idea/prototype for an emotional line following robot, then a snowplow, and now it will be an XBee messenger robot!

Refurbishing it was OK, it only took 4 hours. The only thing that was drastically broken was the drive axel. To fix it, I used some Lego axels.

The robot now uses an Arduino, and is powered off of USB. The motor is driven with the Adafruit Motor Shield (I plan to add more motors to the robot someday). The motor is powered from an Adafruit mintyboost.

I broadcasted the refurbishment to the Fat Man and Circuit Girl stream, AND took a photo every 5 seconds! You can see the HD timelapse on Vimeo!

The next steps for this robot is rather short:

• Make a battery pack for the Arduino
• Attach XBee
• Mount an ultrasonic sensor, program a simple behaviour
• Transmit messages, listen to messages

Can’t wait to blog more about it!

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

FNR BubbleBoy Lamp Video

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Monday, January 26th, 2009

Here is the video of BubbleBoy reacting to the lamp turning on!

It is also on youtube.

The “squeaking” that you hear was one of the servos pulsating, most likely due to a short. I unplugged it later, and it stopped. ^_^

Posted in: Projects, Robot.

Friday Night Robotics

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, December 26th, 2008

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
Best of all… it’s ROCK EM SOCK EM ROBOTS DAY! (Boxing Day)

Just as a fair warning, if this entry has more bizarre grammar mess-ups than usual, it’s because I ate too many jelly beans, and all I can think of is jelly beans! Robot jelly beans, jelly bean slushie, a meadow of jelly beans, jelly bean snow… *goes on and on* I think in pictures… and all I can think of right now is a DANCING JELLY BEAN ROBOT! Hahaha, joking. (Or am I?) ^_^

I hardly realized it was Friday today, so it doesn’t really feel like a FNR.

Last Friday, although I didn’t blog it, I was working on the LEDs that you’ll see on the stick, and the program! This Friday I tested and twirked the program so I can blog it.

Here is MANOI!

Do you notice something different about the stick?

The stick now has two perf boards on it! These perf boards have three yellow LEDs surrounding a LDR which has black construction paper around it.

The reason why I chose these yellow LEDs was nothing scientific. These were the only ones I had where I could have some consistency across the two boards. The LEDs on the left are inside of a yellow casing. The ones on the right are in a clear casing. There is a little bit of a difference in the readings of the LDRs, but they both work the same.

I would have really liked to do a different version of this but with an IR sensor and a FSR, but, as I mentioned above, these were the only things I had, and they will for sure get the job done!

What happens is the LDRs “spit out” a reading of the amount of light around it. I use the cardboard to ensure it is directed at what we want to be observing. When there is no object between the two LDRs, the reading is very high. Yet, when there is an object between the two, the reading drops a fair amount. This is because the LDR cannot sense the light from the opposite LEDs. I also tested this with a fairly white object (my DAD’s lead solder spool (eeew lead)) and it does work, meaning the reflected light from the LEDs back into the LDR (on the same board) does not obscure it. You can see for yourself in the video below.

I tinkered with the LDRs’ amount that it to create a threshold that will trigger MANOI’s shot. From what I learned at Stanford, this is simply called a neuron. It has input values, and if they meet a certain threshold,it will do something. This is a very primitive form of AI, but big things come in simple steps. =)

Here is a video of MANOI action! Pretend that the roll of tape is a hockey puck… it almost looks the same!

It is also on youtube, here.

At the beginning, you see the LEDs flash. This means that the Arduino is soon going to evaluate the LDR levels. It takes five samples from each LDR, one every 500 ms. It then makes an average, which is the baseline used for comparing the LDR value against the threshold.

Yes, I agree, that this can completely become messed up. I will probably implement a markov approach to create (and update) the baseline. However, I’ll probably only do that after I make a modified Bayes algorithm for the AI.

You might have noticed something different about MANOI’s other hand. I’m giving it a gripping claw so that it can grip stuff. It won’t be meant to hold on to anything precious, but it could emphasize an effect here or there.

While I was adding on the boards, there was just not enough room for all of the stuff that I needed… like +5V and -Gnd. I made a thing with headers and inverted headers so I can easily plug it in!

It saves much needed space on the wave shield:

Just to add, today I was using an Arduino with an ATmega328.

There are more pictures that you can look at in this photoset on Flickr!

This project is almost finished! I just will add in an algorithm improving the AI, make more videos… and that’s it! I will continue the project later on, though with a few more things. I’ll add servos that can rotate the leg so I can make the robot actually skate, and many more things that I am still thinking of.

Can you believe that the Trossen Robotics robot contest deadline is really soon? Yikes!!
I just have to take a few more videos and work out what I will say in my post… what do you think the judges will be looking for? Hopefully it won’t end up like BubbleBoy in crabfu’s competition… x_x

Though, when crabfu was on Daily Planet (I actually saw it on TV (like two months before all of the robot websites started to go crazy over it), not on youtube) he described his robots as having character because you can interact with them through a control pad.

I think that is completely opposite, because then it is just the human expressing their character through a machine. When you don’t have to use a remote, yet the robot still interacts with its environment, that’s when a robot truly has character. :d

Now we know why BubbleBoy obviously lost… He can have his definition, and I’ll have mine. His works are very interesting though! I never knew you had to start a fire to make a steam thingy move. I figured you would just boil water or something… hahahaha (I never thought as far as you would need fire to make water boil, though… EPIC NOT-WIN!) XD

I hope you really enjoyed this blog post. It makes a lot more sense now that one can see what the finished robot will look like!

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.

MANOI Skate + Music Video

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Thursday, December 11th, 2008

Here is the MANOI Skate + Music video

I’ll be documenting this robot more in the next few days.

I hope to work more on my snowplow robot tomorrow

Posted in: MANOI, Projects, Robot.