Engineer Zero

Assembling Goldie the Grisbot

Posted on March 23, 2013 by engineerzero

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged goldie, grisbot, manufacturing, robot, robotics | Leave a comment

Phineas and Ferb Fan Fiction

Posted on March 21, 2013 by engineerzero

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged de-volitionator, fan fiction, phineas and ferb | Leave a comment

Sketchup-to-SVG problem

Posted on March 16, 2013 by engineerzero

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged laser cut, sketchup, svg | Leave a comment

Grisbot revisions for prototype 2

Posted on March 15, 2013 by engineerzero

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:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged grisbot, revision, robotics, sketchup | Leave a comment

Grisbot in Scratch with obstacle

Posted on March 13, 2013 by engineerzero

A video demo of another challenge course with Grisbot:

Here’s some detail on the screens:

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Grisbot in Scratch Demo

Posted on March 12, 2013 by engineerzero

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.

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grisbot catch and release slide show

Posted on March 11, 2013 by engineerzero

This gallery contains 11 photos.

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Grisbot Catch and Release

Posted on March 9, 2013 by engineerzero

Introducing the new, perhaps improved, L-catcher:

Why an L-catcher? Because I think it can be used to not only catch but also release hoops. Here’s an example course for how releasing (aka ‘delivering a hoop’) could work:

First we drive past the hoop receiving station:

Then we position ourselves in front of it:

Now we turn:

The red arrow on the driving surface between waypoints 2 and 3 means that we’re in reverse:

And ta-da:

Can Grisbot’s servos be timed with enough accuracy to perform this operation? Can a catch operation be combined with a release operation? Those are the challenges.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged catch, grisbot, l-catcher, release, robotics | Leave a comment

Grisbot Hoop Capture Challenge

Posted on March 8, 2013 by engineerzero

Grisbot not only maneuvers, now it can capture and retrieve objects. At any rate, I’m thinking of making a hoop capture challenge. Roughly, the hook device and the capture operation look like this:

Because the hook automatically captures the hoop, the user need simply program the course as before. To illustrate, here’s an example challenge:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged capture, grisbot, hook, hoop, robotics | Leave a comment

Program revision bookmark

Posted on March 5, 2013 by engineerzero

The grisbot program written in the Arduino IDE has grown to 20K, or about twenty typewritten pages. It takes many sessions to write the code and then to revise it. When I take a break and come back later, how do I find the place where I left off?

Well, instead of relying on aging memory or scrolling for wasted minutes, my very simple tip/trick is to foresee the problem and make a ‘bookmark’ comment can later be quickly located with the IDE’s Find feature:

Sadly, the Find has to be done on each tabbed section in the IDE code, but still this technique is a time saver.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bookmark, programming, tip | Leave a comment