The ROBOT PARTY is tomorrow (Thursday) at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This is a very special edition broadcasted LIVE from Evil Mad Science that is celebrating the fantastic website LetsMakeRobots and their recent version 4 fundraiser! If you donated to their v4 fund before May 1st, then you were entered into a drawing to win 5 fabulous prizes from seeedstudio!
But the fun doesn’t stop there! How are we to determine who will win these prizes? With a robot of course! Read on more!
Getting an AVR to blink might seem like an incredibly difficult task compared to the usual Arduino blink, but it really isn’t! In this post we will be uploading a basic blink example to an ATtiny2313. This is perfect for projects where using an Arduino would be over the top. So let’s get started!
Tomorrow (Thursday) is the Robot Party! This Robot Party is VERY SPECIAL because it is taking place at +Evil Mad Science!
They have tons of robots here, the biggest one is the shopbot. We might put the webcam on the shopbot and have it move around! +Lenore Edman & +Windell Oskay will also be around so you can ask them LOTS of questions!
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What is the Robot Party?
The Robot Party is a weekly Google+ hangout that brings together robot builders from all over to share their robots, knowledge, and ask questions! It is for all age ranges, young or old, just bring your robot!
To watch the Robot Party, go to the Robot Party page here:
http://robotgrrl.com/robotparty
To join the Robot Party with your robot, watch our Google+ page right here for the hangout! (Usually 5-10mins before showtime)
To see old photos of the Robot Party, check out the flickr collection here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robotgrrl/collections/72157629489421269/
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Looking forward to hanging out with everyone again! We’ve heard from +Sean Lewis +Eaglesnest Robotics recently and they have been building up their +Christopher Robinson Tiny Tanks, so it will be really cool to see them!
Also since this is on the tail end of RoboGames and the Homebrew Robotics Group meeting, we may have new people!
SEE YOU AT THE ROBOT PARTY! Tell all your friends!”
Guayaquil (often pronounced as “Gwy-a-keel”) is the largest city in Ecuador. It’s a sprawling metropolis of some 4 million people, located just south of the equator and just inland from the pacific ocean.
In downtown Guayaquil, next to a little cathedral, an unassuming city park block features trees and benches, grassy areas behind knee-high fences, coblestone walkways, and gaggles of kids playing with their families. And also, green iguanas. Hundreds of green iguanas.
While formally known as Parque Seminario (Seminary Park– again, it’s next to the little cathedral), the park is better known to the locals as Parque de Las Iguanas, or Iguana Park, and the resident population of iguanas is as people-friendly as they come. The iguanas are not kept behind fences or cages; they roam freely and seem to live in the park entirely by choice. (Of course iguanas are native to the region, and the surrounding city streets are a lot less critter-friendly than the park.) Continue reading Field Trips: Parque de Las Iguanas
One of the perennial problems that we come across in a variety of contexts, including CNC artwork and producing artwork for the Egg-Bot, is the difficulty of creating good-quality toolpaths– i.e., vector artwork representing halftones –when starting from image files.
One of the finest solutions that we’ve ever come across is TSP art,” where the image is represented by a single continuous path. You can generate a path like this by connecting all of the dots in a stipple diagram. Designing a route that visits each dot exactly once is an example of the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (or TSP). From the standpoint of toolpaths (for the Egg bot and most other CNC machines), a “TSP” path is even nicer than stipples, because little or no time is spent raising and lowering the tool.
Today we’re releasing a new program, StippleGen, which can generate stipple diagrams from images, using Secord’s algorithm. StippleGen saves its files as editable, Eggbot-ready Inkscape SVG files, which can in turn be opened by other vector graphics programs, or re-saved as PDF files for use in other contexts. It can also generate a TSP path from the stippled image, and either save that path as an SVG file or simply use that path as the order of plotting for the stipple diagram.
StippleGen is free and open source software, written in the Processing development environment. It comes ready to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it is available for download now.
Continue reading StippleGen: Weighted Voronoi stippling and TSP paths in Processing
We spent the day yesterday in the pits with the teams participating in the 2012 Silicon Valley Regional FIRST Competition and brought back a whole heap of pictures. Thursday is fix, check and test day at the regional competitions. Each robot has been sealed up since the end of the build season and the teams bring them out and get them certified for competition and run them through practice matches.
The pits were extremely busy for most of the day, getting the robots ready for their practice rounds and repairing them afterwards. Team Gatorbotics was one of several local all girls teams. There were teams present from Mexico, Brazil, and several US states.
Some pits were more organized than others. Team 115, Monta Vista Robotics had a beautiful hinged tool cabinet and storage rack with interior lighting. Tools were loaned freely between teams, and whiteboards were used to keep track of loaner tools and practice match schedules.
Robots were made from all kinds of materials and with all kinds of tools. Waterjets, CNC routers, laser cutters, mills, lathes, bandsaws, drill presses, welders, soldering irons and every imaginable hand tool were used to shape plywood, steel, aluminum, PVC, polycarbonate, acrylic, and rubber. The Cheesy Poofs had some of their powder coated spare parts on display.
There was a mobile machine shop just outside the pit area. The teams could bring their materials over and have them machined to their specifications. The operator lamented that there aren’t enough volunteer machinists to help out with this service.
Some teams put a lot of effort into decorating their robots. When not in autonomous mode, the robots were controlled wirelessly through a D-link router, which was a popular place to put stickers.
Seeing the robots put through their paces in the practice matches was good fun. They’re competing Friday and Saturday at San Jose State University, so go and check them out! There are more regional competitions before the championships at the end of April, so check to see if there is one near you. You can also see many more pictures of the robots in our flickr set here.
One of the great things about building electronics projects is seeing what they inspire other people to do, and the 625 LEDs of the Peggy 2 can be pretty inspiring:
Mark at awe.com did some awesome scrolling text on Peggy 2 and has even shared his sketch for others to use. His video is embedded above or you can click on over to YouTube.
Phillip at peilipu’s posterous hooked up a Peggy 2LE and a Danger Shield to play Pong, a game we’re rather fond of.
Nick over at NJS Shredding wired up an off-board Peggy 2, neatly built into a wooden box and mounted to the ceiling. He also posted a video which shows the scale of it quite well.
Another ceiling mounted Peggy 2 installation was recently posted on the Make blog. This one, with an amazing array of ribbon cables connecting strips of LEDs, is entertaining visitors at the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh and was created by the late artist Rick Gribenas. Thanks to Matt Mets for sending us the picture!
Also at a museum in Pittsburgh, Deren Guler used a Peggy 2 in a kid-powered generator exhibit at the Carnegie Science Center. Thanks for sending the picture, Deren!
You can read more about Peggy 2 on our store here, and full documentation is available on our wiki here and links to more projects are posted there as well.
