Day 16.5: CLEAN UP

or "SENSORS?"
or "EVEN MORE SENSORS?"

1.The elevator's got one that keeps it from moving while the door is not quite closed right.  It is missing the one that keeps it from closing on you and your bike though.

2.The one on the hot chocolate machine is pretty excellent, you fill it 2/3rds then let go of the button and it fills the rest up for optimal cocoa:water ratios.  (yum)

3. There is a nifty little light on the inside of the Frigidaire that turns on and off when you open and close the door. (open the refrigerator, close the refrigerator)

4. The butterfly species clock in our room makes butterfly sounds (???) on the hour only when it is not dark in the room.

5. Smoke alarms detect burning popcorn within 3 minutes of ignition!

6. Thermostats make use of bi-metal strips to detect changes in temperature.

7. bikes use simple mechanical "sensors" to operate breaks. (they are so totally pressure sensors)

8. Automatic doors detect motion so they only open when people are there and keep the hot air in mostly.

9. Motion sensors on light switches do similar, for the purpose of saving electricity.

10.Touch pads use resistance sensors (somehow!) to detect where your hands are, and that is why sliding your pen around on it is not the same as your fingers because they are not conductive in the same way.

Day 16: PLACEBO TITLE

or "BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY!!!!"
or "OH MAN FORGET THAT, LOOK AT THIS!!!"


Working today on figuring out a final project some more.

The original plan today was to have multiple robots collaborating to sort and build with blocks.

Apparently getting the robot sorting and creating some sort of order out of a jumble of blocks will be quite a challenge so we are going to start there.  

To start with we are going to work with the reflectance sensors to distinguish between black and white, but Prof. Berg has suggested the possibility of using colored light and multiple checks with the reflectance sensors to measure the color of the object, so more colors are not out of the realm of possibility.

Also putzing in picoBlocks-

why the heck not?

because recursion is cool in 'real life' so why the heck not?

(this one chirps as many times as you plug in for 'store in box1' but I am fooling with the idea of taking the number of times a button is pressed as the input somehow)

Day 15: STORYBOOK AVERSION SYNDROME

or "ACTUALLY A LITTLE CREEPY?"

SO. 7 weeks in and it is just about time to start working on final projects here in RDS land.

The next couple of weeks are going to be difficult considering that my tastes seem to range from technical to super technical.
and the class seems to be ranging from story telling to super cute.

I am considering  seeking out a robotics competition type goal because most of my ideas are 'i think this is technically super neat'

The idea I am leaning towards most is a number of individual robots, which would communicate and collaborate to achieve some goal.  The idea of a spontaneous robot community of sorts is kind of extremely compelling (to me.)

I've considered robots that build things and robots that dance or something,
or play robo-tag

the thing that people seem to be most interested in is kind of where this idea originated from-
duckling-esque following robots?

i guess it is cute?

I am having a little bit of trouble with this idea only because I feel that it is technically very simple?
I'd love to do something more advanced with the idea with collaborative robots in mind,


and while the collaborative robot idea sucks me in,
I have developed a few others while not musing about that-

The first of which is related to the light seeking we did a while back,
maybe having a robot which would seek out and retrieve the light source then return to where it started?

the challenge would be in having the robot remember the path it took then execute it in reverse.
I am actually not sure how easy this would be?
I can definitely see it working in other programming languages, but a sticking point might be making it work in picoBlocks.

and the second is nontraditional motion which poses the problem of maybe not being so interesting to
look at
or even interesting from a non-mechanical stand point, the coding might not even be much to speak of depending.
(especially since there seems to be a lot of focus on the children that come to the exhibition)
(i am not so interested in outside interaction with the robots as i maybe should be)

a second problem is that I am not sure what the robot would do beyond walking

you can tell it is a robot because it has an antennae 

(or tossing itself about grotesquely)

stomp the thwomp!!

Day 14: 3 LAWS OF ROBOTICS

or "be the awesome coolkid"

1.Make
2.More
3.Robots

TOUCHDOWN!!

also teaching everyone illustrator I guess?
It's like yearbook all over again, feels good to be an expert.

Day 13:I HAVE ONE SIMPLE REQUEST!

or "pew pew"

Things that are pretty cool:
Laser printers.

this is my favorite safety sign in the whole science center.

that is

printers that print with lasers

none of that "Laser printer" nonsense

actual laser printers

capable of making super accurate, super custom, super practical, super useful mechanical parts
or super accurate, not so practical ROBOTS-

Super accurate and also super cute!!

Day 11|12: OH MY GOSH CHECK OUT THAT .DEB

or "now there is no reason not to make the switch!'"
or also "FIGHT GOBO FIGHT"

SO.
Working in Scratch now:
Scratch is a programming language/environment that is pretty much picoBlocks but mostly virtual.
You can check it out here:
http://scratch.mit.edu/
and download it for yourself here:
http://info.scratch.mit.edu/Scratch_1.4_Download

most of the coding is for events that happen on screen,
and code is associated with a sprite inside the program-

RUN GOBO RUN

But what we are really doing in Scratch is working with sensors.

DIY sensors.

pretty much anything can become a sensor if you get it wet then hook it up to a resistance sensor

so we rigged a sensor out of wet felt:

high tech electronics sitting in puddles of water

It turns out that as you move the alligator clips further from each other on the felt the resistance increases roughly linearly.

so we rigged a code out of code that translates resistance to notes on a piano-

actually, this is really annoying to people around you!

BUT THAT IS NOT ALL-

another day of fooling around gave us-

FIGHT GOBO FIGHT 

TOTALLY AWESOME T-REX SPRITE

(my magnum opus, i think)

AND ALSO-

the first rule of fight club is ' if(!resistanceB=100)'

code that not only makes annoying piano noises but also makes the sprites shove each other based on x position.
AND GREAT FUN WAS HAD BY ALL

Day 10.5: Loose ends

or "someone just came in and said something about engineering?"
or "what is this- it is usually quiet and there is no one here and I can look for the perfect dumb video link oh man now there is someone else, and there are parents too?"

Hello fall break!
(PS where did everyone go?)
Wrapping things up with Challenge 6:

part one of which looks like this-
"1. ab-on-off: Motor a is on when switch 1 is pressed and is off otherwise; motor b is on when switch 2 is pressed and is off otherwise."
so off we go to code-

the file name is ABBA.png??

and that little stack checks constantly to see if you are pressing either switch-
if at that moment you are pressing that switch it turns the associated motor on,
and if you let go it shuts it off,
which is great, because you can drive it around and make it bump into stuff-

IT IS ACTUALLY PRETTY CUTE

and then part two which looks like-
"2. ab-reverse: Pressing switch 1 reverses motor a on and off and pressing switch 2 reverses motor b. "
which in practice ended up pretty similar-

click click click code code code

With the addition of an initial motorOn and some Waits to compensate for my sub-super-human button pressing abilities
and this is also great because you can make it spin around and run away from you-

IT IS ACTUALLY NOT REALLY AS CUTE?

Day 10: AND THEY'RE OFF

or "BUT FIRST"
or "now I am just avoiding doing day 10.5's work"

So we worked on building that 1:18 train
and we worked and we worked and a tonne of iterations later
we had a thing that looked much like this-

a monster

and stalled.
with more torque it STALLED.
so we loosened everything to eliminate friction,
and then it STILL accelerated less than the 1:15 train.
so that was fun,

we went back to the 1:15 train-
and updated the structure a bit
then managed 3rd place in the final race with a time of 7.96s
pretty okay, pretty okay.

Day 9.5: DON'T GO BETA

or "at least opensource is still awesome some of the time"

This day was not such a good day for robotics or legos or torque

So I attempted to build a gear train with a 1:18
and after several false starts and breaking down and rebuilding the Mystical Unicorn and digging around in gears looking for an easier combo

these are actually kind of sharp

and after going through several combination that all lead to horrible clicking noises and straining sounds and structures that tore themselves apart (yes really)
I learned something important
and that is that lego math does not really work out with gears on the diagonals.

GOSH DARN IT.

Day 9: OKAY LETS GET SERIOUS

or "serious like mecha-exoskeletons for the masses"

Or as serious as you can only get about a robot called 'MYSTICAL UNICORN'
(I am expert at naming things mystical unicorn,
our Jeopardy team for CS review was also Mystical Unicorn)

because, as i have said, Mystical Unicorn is a SPEED DEMON,
coming in 3rd in the first trial for the torque challenge with a time of 8.5 seconds.

HIGH TENSION!!

 The gear train has a ratio of 1:15 using a 24, a 40 and two 8 tooth gears, same as we left her on Friday-

oh, this picture again.

BUT THAT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH
because Lucia and I have been nursing a bit of healthy competition and she beat us with a time of 8.4
(SO CLOSE)

and also because she accelerates a lot, meaning that she doesn't have quite enough torque
(but mostly in the spirit of competition!)

based on the times for other ratios we are looking to get a ratio higher than our current one but less than 1:25,

so we are aiming for an 18 or 20

Day 9: THOSE ARE PIXELATED

or "robots can'

Day 9 was making up for all the whimsy on day 8.5-

That is right, it was time to face the music and impossible the heck out of that box.
SO.
as much of a waste of time that triangle was, I certainly did learn a bit about what you CAN do with legos, in addition to exploring the CAN'Ts

and using some of the things I came up with while fighting with the triangle and paying special attention to THE MATHEMATICS OF LEGO I cobbled together a little sleeve for my weights-

Don't laugh, legos are hard work

and then that sleeve got a sleeve all it's own to avoid the issue of caps popping of and weights going everywhere-

why is this image so small? geeze.

and then more pegging to keep the weights from slamming into stuff-

oh my gosh this is even smaller!!

AND THEN
I dropped it.

and instead of blowing up-
it LIVED.

TWO METERS.
OH MY GOSH!

actually, one came off.

It actually only blew up a little,
but only a little,
one piece came off.
(the moral of the story is do not put extra pieces on simply because then it would be symmetrical)

Day 8.5: IDIOSYNCRASY

or "you can actually buy this poster?"

So, went into the lab today to do some work
It is actually kind of creepy when there is no one in there on the weekend-

it was great, i put my stuff all over all the tables.

and ended up working, not on BOX IMPOSSIBLE as I'd intended, but on-

"Challenge 7: PicoCricket Motion Modules

LEGO motors spin around in circles. But there are lots of other interesting

kinds of motions that you might want to incorporate into your robot project.

To get a sense of some of the possibilities, build at least one of the “motion

modules” posted at:

http://www.picocricket.com/motion.html

Use your motion module and some craft materials to make a whimsical

animated creature."

So, after a few minutes of searching for pieces and putzing around and building and listening to Radiolab-

PHOTOBOMB!!

I had a thing that looked like this.
and then the fun part happens, the WHIMSY-

"IDIOSYNCRASY"

and then-

Dolphins are pretty whimsical, right?

Day 8: MYSTICAL UNICORN JUNIOR JUNIOR

or "how did it take me 'till October to put this up here?"

I am full of nostalgia,
great nostalgia for the original Mystical Unicorn-

RIP MYSTICAL UNICORN

who was of similar construction to our latest project-

Do not tell Helena that I am calling it 'MysticalUnicornJunior'

The MysticalUnicornII is a SPEED DEMON.

She goes about .3m/s (we think) while carrying a 1kg weight.

Helena and I got her moving with the help of a gear train, it is pretty neat that she moves at all!

(seriously! look how big that weight is by comparison! huge!!)
So, here is where the magic happens-

there's a 24 tooth, a 40 tooth and a pair of 8 tooth gears in there

the gear train.

like shifting gears on a bike, raising the gear ratio increases the torque.

(at the expense of speed, but so it goes)

The thing to do now is figure out if we can make her move even faster by decreasing the torque.

We'll have to see if we can get her any faster with out stalling.

Helena (my new parter!) can be found at her blog- Adventures in Robotic Design Studio,

check it out!