Here are three obstacle courses, which can be selected by choosing the corresponding icon at the top of the screen:
I’ve been thinking about adding different modes, such as following a flashlight beam. If you have any ideas for what you’d like to see a simple robot do, let me know and I’ll try to add it.
The breadboard and battery holes should have been the exact same size from (Blue) Babe to Goldie. Instead, on Goldie the holes appear to be a quarter inch too small in width.
Why? I revised the part, but I don’t recall compressing the holes. Maybe I did, or maybe something else is going on.
This is depressing because I was hoping to blog about a completed second robot today. Well, I’ll get a new top piece cut and it’ll just have to be another day.
Not like that. Like this:
Also recommended: Cup your hand over the clippers when you snip the unbent lead even with the bent, which sounds metaphorical but will in practice keep little metal bits from flying hither and yon.
Here are the parts laid out for ‘Goldie’ the Grisbot. I call her Goldie because her acrylic casing will be yellow, and ‘Yellowy’ doesn’t quite work as a name for a vivacious young lady.
First step is to place the ATMega328 microcontroller onto the Arduino platform for testing and programming:
Next begins servo conversion:
. . . and I’m learning a lot about the assembly process. Like how I need to clear off the work space, keep the tools where I can find them, get better lighting.
I calculate that in order to stay afloat businesswise I’ll need to assemble at least twenty kits a day, and that’s not going to work if I take half an hour to convert each servo. So there is room for improvement. But you learn by doing, and this was only the first hour of my assembly line experience.
Sketchup-rendered illustration of Doofenshmirtz Do-Volitionator from the Phinas and Ferb episode, ‘Brain Drain’
Phineas and Ferb are about two of my favorite topics, humor and engineering. A couple years ago, I decided to write some fan fiction in the format of the show. Here are the stories:
Candace’s Little Helper. Candace discovers Candroid from when the boys built their brobots, and decides to keep her. Fearing a robot revolution, Phineas and Ferb try to bust her. Doofenshmirtz builds a robotic girlfriend for Norm, and Perry prevents him from thwarting himself.
Shutter Speed. Candace hyper-accelerates so that seconds seem like hours. Doofenshmirtz reverts himself and Perry to childhood and Norm expresses his opinion on the matter.
Who’s Crazy Now?. After a bust too far, Candace is taken by her mom to see a psychiatrist. After her father comes down with sniffles, Vanessa subs for the day as evil mad scientist.
Mini Black Holes and Little White Lies. Phineas, Ferb, and Doof try to save the world from a black hole but get in each other’s way. K-rated, but maybe the humor is a little too black. Sorry . BTW, some of the events — sky spiral, sinkhole — actually happened. That’s either funny or creepy!
Ferb of the Future. To resolve their age difference, sixteen year old Ferb time-travels to the present to be with Vanessa and learns a valuable lesson about destabilizing the time-line and jeopardizing the existence of the universe.
Third-Person-Narrative Phineas and Ferb seek to write a story . . . about Phineas and Ferb writing a story. Either this is a literary experiment, or I have run out of story ideas.
I seemed to have discovered an interface problem between Sketchup and the SVG plug-in. Here’s the part that I wanted to convert into SVG format:
Not that complicated right? But here is how it appeared after I exported to SVG and then loaded the SVG file into Inkscape:
As a workaround, I exported the part separately to SVG, then merged it in Inkscape with the file containing the other parts. It appeared okay, so I gave it to the associate at Metrix to have it laser cut. He said that the part had double lines and suggested that it had something to do with SVG format.
After minutes of thrashing around, I realized the problem was more fundamental. In Sketchup, the part looked fine on the screen, but I suspected that there was something about the invisible software commands attached to the part, and while it didn’t affect anything in Sketchup it caused things to turn out wrong in SVG.
So I used the Sketchup tape measure to measure the dimensions of the old part and generated a new copy of the part by clicking out the outline segments one at a time. That process may seem unnecessarily cumbersome, but it ensured that there would be absolutely no invisible software link between the old and new versions of the part.
Sure enough, the new version of the part came out right in SVG format without having to export it separately:
I won’t assign blame between Sketchup or the SVG plug-in, as both programs are free and I’m mainly happy with them the way they are. Let’s just say that this one time there was a communications fail between them and you may have to watch out for it.
I plan to build the second prototype today, and here is what it should look like:
Wheels will use rubber bands instead of gaskets (saving $1 each wheel):
Holes in the lid will enable a wire ‘hoop catcher’ to be installed:
These notches in the lid allow for wires to be routed from the bread board to the interior of the robot:
These weird shaped holes in the front edge of the base will allow for placement of photocells and a light source, in case I want to add line-following capability:
A video demo of another challenge course with Grisbot:
Here’s some detail on the screens:
You’ll have to view the video here, because for some reason Youtube has overwritten the embedded link for this video with the one for the obstacle video.
This gallery contains 11 photos.
Engineer Zero 