Robots, Replicas, and Recreations

Family team hanging out and making some robots. Follow along with our current builds, or check out our full-size Doctor Who K9, miniature Dalek, and Portal's Wheatley. Feel free to ask questions! 

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Wheatley, Portal 2

‘Glados’ animation sequence

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Wheatley, Portal 2

‘Fact Sphere’ animation sequence

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Wheatley, Portal 2

‘Flashlight’ animation sequence

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Wheatley, Portal 2

‘Pick Me Up’ animation sequence

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Stabby the Roomba Update

A little test run of Stabby with the impact trigger hooked up to the audio. The battery pack is not secured yet so it tends to fall off the back a little. The next step is continuing to put his frame back together while making sure all the wires stay out of the way of the motors, and continuing programming.

We attempted to retain his original wheels but couldn’t make them work, so we’re using two wheels meant for scooters/roller skates. The original front wheel of the roomba remains as that was never motorized and exists for balance support. 

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Stabby the Roomba Update

We hooked up one of the 3w high output LED for the heart beat function, the voltage sensor so that we can display battery status on a led, and have the speakers hooked up. Thus when we hit the accelerometer the following happens!

The next steps are to get the remaining components mounted inside the Roomba and to calibrate the accelerometer so that it does not trigger when acceleration is from the motors and only from an impact.

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Stabby the Roomba Update

We’ve added a acceleration monitor, so Stabby will react when it hits something and stops suddenly. The difficult part will come when during programming as we filter out normal movement forces from the impact forces so the response animations will only trigger upon an impact and not from normal speeding up/slowing down.

For now these are test lights showing the reaction as well as a heartbeat blinking pattern. Different, brighter lights will be mounted on the actual roomba. 

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Stabby the Roomba Update

It lives! Motors are in the roomba base-those as you can tell the battery is not strapped down yet...

We’ve just taken out the vacuum parts of the roomba and replaced them with motor controllers. We’re still using the original wheels

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K9 V3 Update

Hello after a long break! We spent the summer outside as much as possible, and now with winter here -and supply routes working better as the world learns to manage Covid- we’re moving back into bot making mode. 

We’ve been working more on K9, continuing our process of updating him.

The updated software is working again with a web based controller that works from an i-phone (larger the better), IPad, or PC. We lost some of the last work that we did a year ago when we shorted out the Pi, but it’s been fast to re-do. We then worked to recalibrate the servos (head, tail, ears) to work properly with the updated software. This is the larger interface set up. It allows more simultaneous control than blynk did on the phone, as you don’t have to stop one control while flipping to a different tab to start another animation.

We confirmed the interface to the motor controller is working and mounted the pi, screen, and motor controller back into K-9. We just need to hook up the LEDs and servos, and clean up the new wiring. Then we need to switch to the Pi driven router so that no internet connecting is needed. We had worked through this last winter and we think it’s straight forward. Once complete K-9 will weigh a good 8 – 10 lbs less which should allow for even better turning and longer battery life.  

By the time spring comes around and it’s warm enough, he should be ready to go out for ‘walks’ again!

New features include:

PowerSave mode that only runs the hover lights when he moves and dims the eyes

Camera in nose can be streamed to the I-phone/IPad.

3 selectable tail movement patterns in addition to the basic movements and the existing two speed ear movements

Thinking about adding one button to run a set script, ala Wheatley. For example: Raise head, say ‘I am K-9′ while wagging tail and ears, blink hover lights, lower head.

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Stabby the Roomba Update

The roombas have arrived! 

With this we have most of the parts to begin assembling and programming Stabby. We have a backup if things go wrong though hopefully we’ll be able to use both a start building a fleet of Stabbys! OG Stabby will likely remain unedited foever.

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Stabby the Roomba Project Plan

These are the current ideas for Stabby the Roomba. Some of his ideas deviate a bit from the original internet concept of Stabby, but his ‘normal’ setting will stay true to that image. However we proudly enjoy looking at something and going ‘but what else can we make it do’ and so Stabby will hopefully be able to do all of the following:

Speed:  Top speed of about 4.5MPH, faster than a good walking speed.  A bit like the following:  https://www.roboticsbusinessreview.com/rbr/hacked_roomba_is_the_worlds_fastest_robot_vacuum/

Voice:  Four selectable options

Mute – the basic Roomba that does not complain

Talkative – Complains when it hits something, but G/PG

Pissed – Progressively get more pissed off every time it hits something.  See video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvz3LRK263E

Hunter/Killer mode – plays the theme from Jaws

Lights:  Fully selectable lights under the outside edge of the Roomba.  These would change with the voice options

Mute – Either no light or a nice cool blue or green

Talkative – Blue to White as he runs into things

Pissed – Blue or White progressing to pulsing Red as he hits more and more objects.

Pulsing red like a heartbeat

We may able able to color code the little battery light on top to indicate mode

Control:  Remote control using a Wiimote with nun-chuck

Joystick - Speed and direction

Button C - On nun-chuck, Voice without hitting anything

Button Z -  On nun-chuck, selects Voice & Lights mode (1, 2,  3 or 4)

Button C+Z - Would make him shake back and forth or spin in a tight circle at high speed

+/- on Wiimote - Volume

Blue Leds on Wiimote -Indicate which mode Stabby is in (1,2,3, or 4)

When Stabby hits something he will stop and turn 45 – 90 degrees. We may want a standard mode when he keeps moving slowly until overridden by the joystick.

Needed parts:

Pi Zero 

Arcade Bonnet (to interface bumper sensors)

Two 600 RPM motors and mounts

Two 2.5” skateboard style wheels

 Motor controller

4 cell LiPo battery (14.2v)

Audio Amp & Speaker

Strip of side light NeoPixel LED’s or 5 to 6 -  3 watt pixie LED’s.

Wiimote with nun-chuck

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New Upcoming Project!

Introducing Stabby the Space Roomba!

The idea of Stabby the Space Roomba has been going around Tumblr for a long while, and about two years ago we decided to made this little guy out of a broken 1st Gen Roomba. There won’t be a long post about his creation because it basically consisted of forcefully ripping out the vacuum parts and screwing a rc car on in their place. 

We are excited to begin our process of upgrading him to a walking, talking, stabbing, controllable Roomba! Progress updates will be done the same way Wheatley’s were, so stay tuned to hear about Stabby’s progress!

Note: Please don’t use real knives on your Stabbys; that’s dangerous. Real knife is for photo purposes only because we temporarily lost his plastic one. 

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K-9 V3 Update

All of the hardware parts that we needed to repair K-9 are in along with a new board that connects various I2C devices. We hooked up a new Pi, servo controller, screen, and the new I2C connector and all are running just fine. 

We haven’t ordered the machine learning accelerator, Google Coral, yet but will do so soon. This combines with an update from the Pi3B+ currently used to the new Pi4 and will allow K-9 to identify objects with his nose camera. We are planning to test all of this on a separate set up (so we don’t fry K-9...again) and then migrate the changes into K-9. We still have a lot to learn about AI & machine learning, so no firm timeline on this enhancement.  For some examples on what you can do with Coral see https://coral.ai/examples/ .

After about 2 hours of work we now have the drive control working. We ran into two issues:

The old K9 software used Python 2.x and we upgraded to Python 3.x with this version of K9. There are some differences, and the way Python handles strings is one of them. Since the Pi communicates to the motor controller through serial over the USB cable, handling strings is key. We finally found the solution, but it was not immediately obvious and took some time.

We then ran into issues with communication across the correct USB “port”. The new K-9 runs on a P3B+ and the old one uses a Pi3; something changed between the two. After about an hour of hit and miss, we found a Unix comment that would display USB device details when a device is plugged in / pulled out. With this information all we had to do was change the 4-character USB name to the correct one and the motor controller started responding to the joystick.

Other updates to his existing functions:

The hover lights can now be either on or speed sensitive where they get brighter that faster K9 moves.

K9’s eye brightness can now be set by the user.

“PowerSave” mode sets the hover lights off when not moving and the eye led’s down to 25%.

The only open item is to read the battery voltage every minute and display it on the remote. When the battery gets low it will send a warning message to the remote and automatically go into power save mode. Once we have the voltage sensor hooked up, we need to bolt everything back into K9 and then he’ll be good to go again! 

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K-9 V3 Update

While waiting on the replacement electronics that we accidentally smoked last weekend, we’ve worked on adding live streaming video from K-9’s nose camera to the remote.

We first found an example on the web using the Flask server that I am using for K-9’s new control. However, the example uses the Flask HTML server as opposed to the Flask Socket server and they could not be run together. In theory you can stream video over sockets but the client (IPad) script gets complicated.

We then found an example using the Python simple server that I tried to run as a Subprocess/Thread. However, we could never get this to work.

We then attempted to run the Python server as a separate instance with the os.popen object. This would launch the server program and run as long as the main control sever was not running, but since we use the PiCamera in the main program for previewing K-9’s nose camera on his side screen, the server program could not access it simultaneously. We then moved the preview to the separate python video server program and added a parameter to the separate python program to either 1 – preview only, 2- stream only, 3-stream and preview. We also added a frame into the IPad/HTML control program that links to the separate streaming video server using the :8000 port. Success! This may not be the most elegant solution; but it works, its quick to load, and cpu usage is minimal.

Here is a photo of the IPad control with streaming video.  The PiCamera was looking at the ceiling, but you can see how it works.

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K-9 V3 Update

We switched from the new software to working on updating K-9’s hardware over the weekend.

Replaced the heavy SLA batteries with LiFe batteries. This reduced K-9’s weight from about 44 lbs down to 38 lbs with the same battery capacity.

Re-wired the 12v circuit using a 24v to 12v converter as opposed to pulling the 12v off of just one of the batteries. This avoid discharging one battery faster and damaging the battery.

Started the circuitry for the 24v battery monitor that will provide battery status on the remote. Just need to mount this on the main electronics board.

Started the circuitry for dimming the hover lights and eyes. We will have to solder in a few more wires to complete this and mount it to the main electronics board.

Cut a hole in front of the speaker and covered with the a grate to enhance the volume.

Once we get all of the new circuitry wired, we can test the updated software.

We also did some research on AI visual object detection and may order a Google Coral co-processor to play with. The Coral AI processor is designed to run Tensor-flow models for AI tasks like object detection and facial recognition. With K-9’s camera and the Coral board, we could have a game of playing with K-9 where you hold up and object and he recognizes it and speaks its name. The demo object database has about 1,000 objects. This would make K-9 look pretty smart and would be incredible to implement!

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K-9 V3 Update

On the initial K-9 version we used NodeRed, Python, and Blynk to enable control by an I-phone. This was a fast to implement solution since we had no experience programming in JavaScript / HTML. 

However it had several issues:            

Time needed at boot to load both the Blynk and NodeRed servers. 

Challenges to keep the servers in sync through various software releases.      

User interface limited by Blynk’s options.

On K-9 V3 we are simplifying the architecture using just Python and a Flask server. This allows for a quick load on boot and by using sockets we maintain fast communications between the I-Phone and control.

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K-9 Version 3!

Back in the summer of 2016 we built a full size replica of K-9 from Dr Who based from BBC drawings and operated by a model airplane RC control. (K-9 V1) 

During the winter/spring of 2017 we updated K-9 to include a Raspberry Pi and control through an I-Phone using a local Blynk server and app; Python, and Node-Red.  This also added voice and video capability.  (K-9 v2)  K-9 won best prop at Anime Iowa that summer.

Now it’s time for another update!  V3 planned updates will include:

Conversion of the remote control from the Blynk app on an I-Phone to a local web server and an I-Pad/I-Phone control.  This will allow increased flexibility in the user interface and reduce software complexity eliminating the node-red and Blynk servers on the Pi.

A change from heavy SLA (Lead Acid) batteries to LiFePo or Lipo batteries to reduce weight. This will increase both operating time and improve counter-rotation.

An update to the electrical system to allow for speed sensitive “hover lights”, control of eye brightness, and to better balance the load on the batteries.

The ability to stream video from K-9’s nose camera to the I-Pad.

Keep an eye out on the blog for K-9 updates! Since he’s already on V3, his updates won’t be numbered like Wheatley’s but they’ll all be tagged/titled K-9 V3.