Last weekend I travelled to Seattle for Robothon 2009. Eileen went with me although she spent Friday and Saturday at the Emerald City Writers Conference. Why she would prefer to hang out with a bunch of authors instead of a bunch of geeks is a question you can probably answer for yourself.

Unlike 2007, this year’s event was a bit more subdued. The Seattle Robotics Society didn’t hold the event in 2008 due to a lack of enough volunteers to run the event. I’d expected this year to see a big resurgence in interest but it didn’t happen. I hope the people that did get out to the event had fun though, I certainly did.

The only event I participated in this year was Minisumo, with The Thin Man. I’ve been too busy at work to have time to build new robots, and since we were cleaning our house up (to sell it, after buying another house) I had to pack away my workshop. If you recall, The Thin Man placed first in the 2007 event but this year was a different story: two straight losses and I was out. The Thin Man is no longer the “state of the art” in terms of building that it used to be, and its showing its age. The victors this year in Minisumo were students from Mexico with extremely nice robots.

I was busy at the event even though I wasn’t competing. I volunteered to organize this year’s Robo-Magellan contest, an outdoor navigation event where robots have to drive around the park at Seattle Center to locate orange traffic cones. Fastest robot to go from the starting position to the ending position wins. It is really a nifty event, requiring robots of more sophistication than some of the more “classic” games like Minisumo or Line Maze. I’m really intrigued with this event and have started to get organized to build a robot with a hope to enter the event next year. More on this project in an upcoming post.

One of the more noticeable things about this year’s Robothon was the lack of participation. There were probably just as many people watching as in past years, but the number of competitors, particularly from the Seattle Robotics Society membership, was down. There have been a number of discussions online about this phenomenon, its not just something in Seattle but happening in many places and its been happening for a while. The number of explanations offered in these discussions outnumbers the participants and I don’t think there is any agreement about the root cause. I’m convinced its not temporary, but instead signals a need for a radical change in the structure of events like Robothon and maybe even how the hobby robotics “industry” (clubs, groups, etc.) is organized. This includes the Vancouver Robotics Club which I’m one of the organizers for.

I did manage to take about fifty pictures while I was at Robothon, mostly the Robo-Magellan event and a handful of random other things.

Today was the monthly meeting of the Vancouver Robotics Club. There were some really cool projects to see. I took my Tin Can Tools Hammer project along to show everyone what I’ve been working on. Most recently I’ve been connecting it up to a touch screen using I2C. When its done I’ll post more about it.

James brought a beautiful four-legged walking robot project. Its still a work in progress but as you can see from the photos it is very well crafted. Here is a movie of it walking. James describes it as “swimming”. He wants to redesign it to add another servo to the lower leg to enable more precise movements and better walking. I’m sure it will be amazing.

Ian brought his hacked Roomba to show off, here is a movie of it wandering around the floor. At about the 6 second mark you can see him driving it from his tablet computer; his Rooma has a Bluetooth link, and he wrote some custom software to drive it around. Later in the same video (around the 10 second mark) you can see my Metal Insect robot wandering into the frame. For a while Ian was “herding” it around the room!

By the way all of the video was taken with my iPhone 3GS then resampled in QuickTime Pro to be a reasonable size download. Neat!

From the exceptionally low frequency of updates to this site this year you’d think that I have nothing interesting to post about. Not true. Things have been exceptionally busy at work, and I’ve also managed to find some interesting things in my pursuit of building robots.

I took a trip for work to the Sophos HQ in Abingdon, United Kingdom a couple of weeks ago. Its just outside of Oxford, and its a great place. It was really nice to meet people I’ve been talking to (over the phone) for quite a few months now, and the week I spent there was incredibly productive. This was the culmination of a lot of work since spring, and it seems like its only getting more busy now through the summer.

For my robotics hobby I picked up a Hammer board from Tin Can Tools. This is a development board built around a Samsung processor with an ARM 920T core. I have this crazy idea of making a Line Maze robot that runs Linux for the Seattle Robotics Society Robothon event this October. Seriously!

The other major “toy” is my new iPhone 3GS. I’d been waiting for the new model to come out, and I even took time off from work to go stand in line on the morning it was released. I really like it, definitely another solid Apple product. I’ve slowly been re-incorporating Apple products into my household: a 15″ MacBook Pro, a Time Capsule, and now an iPhone. It is just so much better than my previous phone (Motorola Razr) and its also much better than any other device I looked at including the Blackberry product line and the phones running Google Android. I’ve got the iPhone SDK installed and have started writing my first applications. Learning Objective-C is nifty although it makes my brain hurt a little after so many years of writing C++ and Perl/Python/etc.

The day I bought my iPhone I left it with Eileen and I went out to play golf with a friend. By the time I got back she had fallen in love with it too, and demanded we go out and buy her one. So now we are a two-iPhone household.

Golf. Yes, golf. I’ve been playing pitch-n-putt (par 3) golf with people from work this summer and having a great time. I’m not that good but still its a great way to be outside and includes a small amount of physical activity. I don’t think I’ll graduate to playing a full-size course but these short courses are a lot of fun. We’ve lived around the corner from a course for a number of years but never been there. Now I will often get home from work, pick up the clubs and walk five minutes down the street to play nine holes. Lots of fun!

The Vancouver Robotics Club is now regularly holding a new event (the Basic Table Top Challenge) at every meeting as a way to motivate people to build robots.

It worked for me, I scrounged around my various bins and boxes for parts to build something quite different this time around. My latest robot “Optic Nerve” uses a AVRcam as its only sensor. Here is a video of one (4.4mb) of one attempt. As you can see, it didn’t actually work 100% correctly!

The basic algorithm is to follow the black line along the right side of the course, counting the number of horizontal black lines crossed. When the right number of lines is crossed the robot spins around and tries to follow the edge again. In this example video you can see the “spin” rotates too far and it cannot correct for it. I still need to improve that approach.

I’ll try again at the next meeting in May, hopefully I’ll be able to improve the “spin” to be more successful. If you are in the Vancouver area on May 17th then stop by and see for yourself.

I have been working, ever so slowly, on a larger wheeled robot. My efforts to date have mostly comprised of collecting parts: motors, wheels, gears, a GPS module, various electronics bits, a nifty digital compass, etc. I’ve finally started design and manufacture of various parts to start stitching together everything.

My first machined part is a bracket to mount the motor (a Lynxmotion model). This picture shows the four brackets I need; one is mounted on a motor, the one in the front-left is finished and the other two need only to have the “tabs” cleaned up.

I designed the part using Inkscape then exported a DXF file and did the machining on my CNC-equipped Sherline (as described in a previous post). You can see the image of the Inkscape design here. This process works quite well for me.

The problem of course is that the design requires “tabs” between the parts in order to be able to hold the whole thing together while machining. I’ve captured a couple of photos here and here to show what it looked like before I cut everything apart.

Next up is the brackets to attach to these mounts. My initial design will take longer to machine though. The idea is to allow each wheel to pivot independently; the bracket is an “L” shape that extends up and over the center of each wheel. It will make more sense when I have some pictures.