After getting the initial communication between RoboBrrd and MANOI working, I went and fixed some things and added new commands. There are still some aspects that are iffy about the communication, mainly due to timing and the part that there are at least 8 places where if something doesn’t work at the right time frame, then the whole process won’t work. With communicating information without many handshakes and checksums, it is known to not work all of the time.
I made a new video about RoboBrrd and MANOI with the commands. I like the angle used for the robots in this video, it portrays the social cue that they are talking to eachother, which they are, but in their own robotic-mesh way. :3
RoboBrrd now has passive behaviours, which turned out to be really cute and fun. I love how passive behaviours always add so much more depth to the robot. Only problem is the sequential and timing aspect of them, sometimes they override the sensors. Also, the gurgling of the speaker can probably be fixed with a capacitor and resistor. I moved the speaker to the main board from the communication board because it wouldn’t work all of the time. It was really fishy. :/
Last week I worked really hard on RoboBrrd to try and finish something (anything!- just trying to make it work!) for the MAKE: Bots With Character contest. One night I stayed up really late trying to debug the TLC5940 PWM shift out circuit. The next day I ended up scrapping it and just using the Arduino MEGA’s PWM outputs (there are a lot of them!).
Luckily, the contest was pushed back, so I have more time to write the written tutorial. The written tutorial is getting pretty long, it is quite surprising!
The second bio-inspiration video and the design video will be next on the line. Also going to make a character overview of RoboBrrd for the contest.
I am crazy for this contest because I live, eat, breathe social robotics, and having character in your robot is an important part of that and so many people forget about it! I want to show the whole world what it would be like if robots were their own sentient species! I want to be able to get people to make their own interactive robots so that they can experiment too! It is all so super exciting with so many exclamation points!!!!!!!!
