Recently in robots Category

Jon and I will be down south for the day--displaying a ruby programmed mini shaketable, which demonstrates the principles of our larger shake house exhibit at the academy.  The mini mars rover will also make an appearance.  Both of these units can be potentially programmed by students.  

These "rover" boards contain an atmel 328, an xbee socket, a TI SN754410 motor controller, a RHT03 temperature & humidity sensor, and lastly, a simple photoresistor for light sensitivity.  They are based on open source designs and will be open hardware as well.  The original piecemeal prototype was exhibited at the 2013 Robot Block Party @ Stanford.

Here's the controller board and display:

The board on the left shows the backside, where the NES styled membrane buttons will trigger input.  Minus the motor controller & sensor, its essentially the same design as the rover board.  You may notice that the mcu chipset is socketed instead of SMT.  This was done just in case the boards get more hands-on use with children.  For that matter, all of the i/o are still available and configurable.

Here's my fancy lack of style/technique in applying solder paste:

Lastly, here's an early boot screen, destined to change:

more soon!  This instructables covers the prototype version.

This rover made it's debut at 2013's Robot Block Party, and as of yet, has no official name.  It's being developed in conjunction with the CAS Department of Education, and CAS AVEE.  The rover, when complete, will be 100% open-source and open-hardware.  It will hopefully be available as a California Academy of Sciences classroom kit in the fall.

Students use the NES controller to input navigational commands.  After a transmission delay, the rover enacts the commands, then transmits atmospheric conditions to the controller.  In this manner, students can then plot out their environment and crunch some numbers.  For those of you that remember dos, its kinda like logo/turtle!

The rover prototype is made of a bare-bones construction, via arduino and xbee.  The controller is 3D printed and currently has some NES guts in it.  When complete, both the rover and controller will have open-source schematics & layout--stl files as well.  

here's some coverage and a photo by James Martin of cnet. 

The 8-bit atmel attiny13  has 6 i/o and a crystal-less speed of 20mhz.  We've paired it with a 2x1 audio switch and a 2 watt utility amplifier on a 50x50mm board.  Every i/o of every chip is accesible via the terminals.  You can strip the unit down and make it just an amplifier, or just a signal generator, or just an audio switch!  This capability also gives some nice redundancy and bypass abilities.  One of the two dip-switches operate dependent on the programming of the attiny.  The second one can be used to manually control the audio switching.  The output crossover capacitor is pretty hefty at 1000uf, providing some nice low end in the speakers, but can be easily swapped out.  There's also an isp header for atmels mkII in-system programmer.  Lastly, we have a 5v regulator and a 12v regulator, both of which can be accessed via terminal.  The unit will certainly work with just a 9 volt battery, but the audio output won't quite have punch!

Click here to see the Kinect Rover @ 1:37 (two-second cameo on the news!)

There's also the Stanford Center for Internet Society's flickr, which documents the day really well.

A special thanks to Andra Keay, for inviting Jon Britton and I to participate!

This rapidly-prototyped rover was upgraded to have a pan/tilt turret.  It goes great with lazers and cats!

Made of:

-Sparkfun pro 5V arduino

-sparkfun tb6612fng motor controller

-xbee 

-df robot chasis and wheels

-df robot servo and mounts

-df robot geared motors

-microsoft kinect

Programed with:

Synapse by Ryan Challinor

Max/MSP 

Arduino

photo by stanford center for internet society

One evening a friend asked if i'd be attending a musical event.  I guffawed and said, "of course not!"  The next day, I checked the site and noticed that my name had been attached to the event as someone who would: operate a robot through the catalyst of kinect.  Well, I hadn't recalled "officially" signing up for this, but with a week to go, proceeded in a focused manner.

The first step was finding Ryan Challinor's synapse for OS X 10.6.  Synapse takes the kinect and provides UDP output/input.  This includes a cool monitor window, as well as skeleton tracking.  The only hard part part for me, was upgrading to OS X snow leopard, which I'd resisted due to the number of "wonky industrial" programs I have on my machine.  

After that, it was a short manner of using the udpsend/receive objects to port everything into MAX/msp.  With that done, the sky is the limit.  But for my purposes, I just ensured that I could track the skeleton based on hits, or by "constant tracking" (in which you must prompt for the kinect data every two seconds or so).  i'll attach the patch for those interested.

The robot itself is nothing fantastic.  Its a simple bot built off of an arduino pro 5V, sparkfun motor controller, and an 802.11b based xbee for data tx/rx, and a super cheap 2.4ghz wireless camera with audio.  It beeps too, and has had a few varieties of sensor interfaced :)

In short order, the Kinect outputs data to MAX/MSP, which then uses the serial object to access the CPU's xbee, which transmits data back and forth with the xbee modem on the rover.  The rover arduino interprets the commands, and then moves.  In this way, kinect gestures could be used to control the robot!  Also, you can see where you're going, via the rover's wireless camera.

Rather, I broke it by violating a simple rule:  ALWAYS USE A PROTECTIVE DIODE!  So with everything broken, the rover would not work for the evening.  Instead I augmented the patch so that gestures would play a midi piano; stepping right increased the scale, stepping left decreased the scale.  The nice bit was that the users got to see the skeleton version of themselves.  The sad thing, is that I found out how shotty the midi interface on my sampler is (as I tried to do this first and could only get sporadic results!)

The attached patch will take synapse data and make it more usable in the max/msp environment.  It's an earlier version, and is certainly ugly.  You'll need to program the col object with the lines of text posted after the patch. 

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