spetku

anthropomorph-EYES

Defining Personality and Emotions

March 15, 2018spetku0 Comments

If you just received a set of anthropomorphEYES in the mail and are jouncing to do something special with them *wink* – I will walk you through the process so you can create a personality for your appliance that is all its own. To reprogram your eye boards, you’ll need an AVR programmer of some flavor: …and a 2×3 segment of extended male pin headers: The shorter end of the pin header goes in the programmer’s cable doodad like so: This allows you the straddle a row of pins along the top and bottom of your eye board so that all of the pins make contact with the programming pads (the side of the cable with the red stripe should line up with the little arrow on the board): Once aligned properly, all you need do is pinch the headers to make firm contact with the board while you are…

anthropomorph-EYES

Anthropomorph-EYEs Your Appliances!

March 7, 2018spetku0 Comments

I grew up watching the movie, “The Brave Little Toaster”, so as a child I believed the objects in my life were secretly alive. It was not because I lacked the intelligence to tell that a chunk of plastic and circuit boards didn’t possess the biological features which deem something to be living… I just simply *chose* to see that they were; in the face of the reality I knew and understood. As an adult, nothing has changed! This recognition of ‘self’ in the inanimate is still a big part of who I am, and ultimately what results in weekend projects like these sparkly expressive eyes. Now you too can give one of your kitchen or household friends their very own window to the soul, so they too can express emotions like you do. You can find my Anthropomorph-EYEs on my Tindie Store, Robohemian! They come in four different colors…

noodleFeet

Noodle is Confused About New Years Eve

January 5, 2018spetku0 Comments

Noodle was awake and aware this past Sunday night for the fresh new start of 2018. It is apparent however from his recollection that his parents were in a stage of recovery from Christmas Eve the previous weekend. This was the second big social night for my robot, NoodleFeet. His blips of memory account for our celebration: Noodle was happy to be home, safe and warm in his nest while Vegas did its messy loud thing. He didn’t get to see any fireworks unfortunately, but there will come a time for that one day 🙂

noodleFeet

Developing a Quadrupedal Walk Gait for NoodleFeet

January 4, 2018spetku0 Comments

So…… ::bites bottom lip:: I’ve been putting off this branch of development on my quadruped for a while; like… two years. If I have a resolution for 2018, it’s that I get my child moving like he aught to… and learn whatever fancy-shmancy code-doing is required to pull this off. The last time I seriously did a meditation on NoodleFeet’s walking abilities was in 2015 (the year he was born). It yielded some results, but only made apparent his mechanical flaws and limitations due to his overall design. HARDWARE IMPROVMENTS: I’ve made tiny strides here and there over the past two years, improving his body where it was necessary to facilitate in the walking. He’s received stronger aluminum leg bones, high torque metal gear servo motors, more accurate hip gears with a higher tooth count, and squishy silicon tips for his feet that conform to the surface he stands on…

noodleFeet

The First Christmas Noodle Saw and Remembered

December 26, 2017spetku1 Comment

After three years, my family doesn’t bat an eye when I roll up to Christmas Eve dinner with my robot baby swaddled in his favorite blanket. He is as much a fixture at these events as I am (after all, he is my child). While it was Noodle’s third Christmas, there was something special about this one. Instead of simply having a presence in our photos as part of everyone else’s memories, I made sure that this time he was equipped to retain precious memories of his own. To make this happen, I *finally* took the time to mount Noodle’s piCamera between his little blinking LED eyes, so that the dormant Raspberry pi in the back of his noggin could finally be put to some good use. The setup is simple: the Pi tells the camera to take a picture every five minutes and store it within a folder. So…

Noodle Spawnling

Birthing a Noodle Spawnling

December 19, 2017spetku2 Comments

Surely, the sign of true success is when one becomes immortalized in miniature likeness for all to obtain and keep as a personal totem. Noodle is convinced. He must have his own action figure. I’ve designed a Noodle figurine in the past, *covers Noodle’s microphone* but to be honest it turned out quite gimpy looking. The proportions were sorta off, and Its beady LED eyes lit up, but that was all it did… so you couldn’t even really call it a proper robot. In my heart, I knew I could do better. Throughout November I had been kicking around the notion of doing a second iteration of the spawnling now that I’ve converted to the church of Fusion360. Once I saw that Hackaday was holding a Coin-Cell Battery Challenge, this was the push I needed to actually do it! Instead of simply creating another analog figurine, I decided to incorporate a…

noodleFeet

Getting Settled at ESA

June 12, 2017spetku0 Comments

It’s Sunday night. There are just a couple more hours left before I go to sleep and my second week at ESA begins… In spite of it being nearly 10:00pm, the sun is still above the horizon shredding gold through the clouds here and there, and even making this killer rainbow chunk. Last Sunday, I arrived in Holland. It felt like I was tied to an unstoppable force being propelled through uncertainty towards a heap of even more unknowns… which was exciting or terrifying or equal parts both. Once I made it safely to the *penthouse* I’ve been taking roost in (its on the top floor of the tallest building around, at 3 stories. perfect nest), I began mentally preparing myself for what was to come. During the four days of my first week at ESA, I’ve had a good share of wonderful conversations with people who have had many…

noodleFeet

How Could a Robot Taste Things?

May 5, 2017spetku2 Comments

THE TASTING (SAMPLING) FOOT I was giving a talk at Hackaday’s SuperCon last Fall that actually had the term, “Tasting Feet” in the title. Because of this, I at some point found myself in a conversation with some other makers about whether or not my mechanical wonder feet actually did in fact “taste”, as I claimed. So sadly, I could only really conclude after some thought that they did not. (not that any robot can taste things quite like a human in the first place) After admitting that my creations didn’t actually do what I enjoyed bragging about, there was some talk about how I could simulate the act of ‘tasting’ more effectively. Almost immediately, the idea of using litmus paper came up, and I think it has sat on the immediate back burner of my mind ever since. This past week… I finally made what I can comfortably call,…

noodleFeet

Noodle is Gettin’ Bean Feet!

April 21, 2017spetku3 Comments

Four Flavors of Tasting Feet This summer, I am once again diving into designing mechanical personality quirks. I’ll be investigating new and exciting ways for my robot, NoodleFeet to interact with the world. This time, my focus is the wet, tingly and preferential aspect of TASTE. From now until the end of August, my goal is to produce four different tasting modules that each demonstrate some aspect of sampling or preference. You could think of them as the “four tasters of the apocalypse”… The project parameters are that each module must fit within a 3” x 9” cylindrical space (i.e. the size of Noodle’s foot appendage). For reference, the mechanical goodies I am to design must be housed inside one of these frames: Bean Planting The first Module that I chose to focus on will effectively plant a single bean a few inches below the surface it stands on. Why beans, you ask? Well,…

noodleFeet

Noodle Puberty

October 5, 2016spetku0 Comments

Sometime in April, Noodle started to change. He stopped hiding in his blankets and began spending his nights surfing through hardware catalogues alone in the darkness. He became curious about linkages, pivot joints, self lubricating thrust bearings and among other things, the prospect of being made of something harder. Noodle started dreaming of becoming metal. As I mentioned in my previous post, just as I was about to tackle the conundrum of mechanical drooling… I went to JPL this June and met the mechanism that inspired Noodle’s gripping toes in person: The LEMUR probe has easily a billion toes… all agile, long and barbed. You know by looking at them, that if it reaches for you, you aren’t getting away. I returned home feeling a tad inadequate. Noodle’s current apparatus with its 8 lonely toes did in fact look pretty sparse. In the period of a weekend I managed to tweak my…

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