Robot Dialogs

I've got an epic St. Patty's Day planned for this Saturday and I thought: wouldn't an LED-ified hat be awesome? Then I thought: "I have to. It's a moral imperative." A couple days shopping around for a bowler hat and green LEDs and here's the result: The LEDs were mounted by using a new (sharp) x-acto knife blade to slice a single small slot in each LED position. I pinned a shamrock pattern to the hat first... The circuit was wire wrapped not soldered. Once all the LEDs were poked through the hat I used copious amounts of hot glue to make them permanent. A 10 kO pot is in line with a 9 volt battery to current limit (and provide a brightness control). A Velcro wire management strap was sacrificed and hot glued in the brow to hold the battery in place. The circuit: Original Image Source: led.linear1.org/led.wiz The top of my head does touch the top of the hat but there's actually just enough room in the front tip for the battery. It fi...

I haven't done a proper project in a long while, and this past weekend it finally got to me. So I decided to try my hand making a prop/replica of the tuberous AI from Portal 2. I give you Potato GLaDOS : Most of it was sculpted from Sculpey and painted with acrylics. The audio comes from an old mp3 player I had lying around. The electronics consist of a LM386 audio amplifier, speaker, LEDs and a simple circuit to pulse the LEDs with the audio.  Here's a long winded explanation breakdown of how it was made . There's a boat-load of build pictures out on Flickr. The audio was pulled from here and spliced together in Audacity . Please support the developers and artists of these amazing games: Purchase Portal 2! And remember: "This. Sentence. Is. FALSE".

I started with pictures and models from the tubes. The image below is a particularly good example showing both sides. Model Reconstructed by ~ Zareste I went to the grocery store and found some models that I could hire for pennies an hour. I used Sculpey for the potato and GLaDOS, but I didn't want to bake it for four million years, and I needed a hollow inside for all the electronics so I made a potato-ish shape with aluminum foil. Keeping the outer layer of aluminum foil as smooth as possible will help when the foil is pulled out of the baked Sculpey. As you might expect potatoes are particularly easy to sculpt. Imperfections are the main feature...trying to keep fingerprints and fingernail marks out of the clay is the most difficult part of it. I don't have a picture, but the large hole (through which electronics are inserted) was cut out of the clay before it was baked. Scupley isn't too brittle after baking, but I didn't want to take a chanc...

This is mostly just to get some pictures up. I'm just getting this posted so I can try and refocus on thesis...I should be so easily sidetracked... Any future developments will be posted in the forum first...I'll post here as facts become more concrete. The farthest I got with this setup was a man-in-the-middle setup (as shown below) where I could intercept the CPU's commands to the LCD passing them through the microcontroller and then to the LCD board. I had to move up to a ~11MHz crystal (not shown) on the microcontroller just to come close to allowing the signals to pass through unhindered. The best I managed was a slightly distorted picture...I'll need something faster to actually read the signals so I can reverse engineer them. I've also removed the GameBoy's oscillator so I could clock the GB at a slower speed. This did work but I haven't taken a ton of time to work on the coding side. The goal when I can work on it again is simply to replace th...

This is a dump from the forum...it's notes on an in progress GameBoy hack. I will refine it later. Forum thread is here . I'm trying to identify and spec out the LCD signals in the GB (classic). I'm looking to do away w/ the GBs original controller board while keeping the LCD board. Basically I want to plug the ribbon cable into my on PCB and output the necessary signals to drive the video myself. I'm just wandering if anyone has more info on LCD signals output by the z80 so I can emulate them to display stuff. So far I've mapped all the buttons, speaker, power LED, LCD negative power to the appropriate pins on the ribbon cable. What I have so far: Note: Pin 01 is the pin on the ribbon cable closest to the power switch (at the cables connector). Note: Pin LCDV1 is the pin closest to power switch on the LCDs vertical axis connector (beneath LCD). Note: Pin LCDH1 is the pin closest to power switch on the LCDs horizontal axis connector. Pin 01 GND Pin...

This is an update and rehosting of a senior design project completed in Spring 2008 at RIT . It is (to date) my favorite robotics project. Myself and two friends collaborated to create a remote controlled turret that was accessible from anywhere on the web. The project makes use of a 5 gallon air tank at ~80 psi to fire foam (Nerf) darts. One servo operates six rotating barrels which are mounted on two more servos that provide pan and tilt movement. There are two ultra bright LEDs providing light in dark conditions for a top mounted web-cam. An Arduino is used to control the turret, while communicating (via serial over USB) with a web server that hosts the custom web page and live video stream. A modified PC power supply was used to provide the power. Here's a video of the finished turret... Full System Test I was in charge of most of the hardware and electrical work, Mike programmed the Arduino (I usually work with other AVR stuff ) to take serial commands from a server...

This post is a retrospective look at the first robot I built solely for myself (back in 2008). I had only helped build one robot before this. It's clear I got a very late start into robotics. Although school did prepare me formally to dive right in, I wish I had been more focused on it when I was younger, I would have really flourished in college. This robot was designed mostly on a whim, but has turned out to be a nice solid prototype, and it is very useful for testing sensors and AVR code... The Parts List: Aluminum Chassis, Motor Mounts & Tire hubs - Machined while I was still at RIT when I had access to their machine shop. No original designs are available, I just went in and used what scrap I could find...I'd be embarrassed by providing the true measurements :). Stepper Motors - From Sparkfun ...I may replace these some day with cheaper gear motors so I can use these steppers in a CNC/Drill Press. EasyDriver Stepper Motor Driver - Also from Sparkfun...sim...

Well I managed to get all the parts purchased, designed and/or fabricated before the weekend of the event. As is often the case with project like this, my designs changed as I searched for parts. You will see below the final designs created in SketchUp (they really are final, based on the bot I took this weekend). I put a great deal of effort into getting exact dimensions in every place I could. In fact the only blatant differences between the drawings and the real robot are in the purchased parts(drill and batteries) which have too many curves to replicate. SketchUp Model I'm pretty certain no one will want to duplicate this exact design (anyone capable would probably find that boring) ; however, some of the components may be useful. The motors , motor drivers , wheels and hubs are all precisely measured, and could easily be copied into another drawing. I've decided on a name: "Spin Cycle" (a suggestion from my older brother). The name stems directly from the...