Feb 15, 2017
"Thank you for last night..."
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"Thank you for last night..."
December Meetup
Thursday, December 17, 6:30 PM @ Startup Edmonton.
This month we’re keeping things super simple. We’ll do a walk through of Oscar’s tutorial on getting Raspberry Pi 2 up and running with the GoPiGo.
Following, we’ll have an open work time where we can help out with some troubleshooting. So bring your robots and laptops if you’re interested.
Jetson Parts List
Jetson: the best source I’ve found is from Newegg.ca (http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813190005&cm_re=jetson-_-13-190-005-_-Product) Shipping is cheap and fast. Includes power adapter and USB micro cable.
A bi-directional Level converter. You’ll also want some header pins for use on a breadboard.
Wifi. You could use a wifi dongle, but I’ve opted to use a mini PCI-e card, Intel AC 7260 Dual-Band WiFi + Bluetooth. You will also need antennas for this card. I got 2 off eBay.
Mini breadboard
Assortment of resistors. It’s a good idea to have random resistors available for robotics in general. A good handful of 1 k and 10 k ohm resistors can get you far, but extra values in between can be helpful.
wire. You will need lengths of wire for various things. You may want to pick up an assortment of precut jumper wires. The holes in the Jetson header are quite small. I would recommend maybe a 26 AWG wire if you’re using stranded (I’m finding 24 AWG tinned stranded a bit too tight). You may be better off with solid wire or the precut jumpers. Note that for connecting the GoPiGo to the Jetson you want Male/Male connectors, such as these.
Header pins. The Jetson uses headers with a 2 mm spacing. This is smaller than normal, so sourcing header pins is a bit tricky. So far I haven’t found what I want, but it’s not really necessary if you have some wire to work with already.
USB to serial connector
serial gender changer
HDMI cable
USB Hub - this board has only 1 full size USB, so you’ll definitely want a hub.
keyboard, mouse and monitor for initial setup.
I still haven’t worked out a battery solution that I’m entirely happy with. You should be able power the whole system off of the 8 AA batteries that the GoPiGo uses, but I think that long term that’s not a great solution, as it’s going to run through batteries very quickly.
Oct 15, 2015 - Introducing the Robot project
Next meetup: Thursday, Oct 15, 6:30 PM @ Startup Edmonton
This Thursday's meetup will be 2 parts: 1. Camilo has a few videos on Robot Vision he will show us. 2. Introduction to the Robot Project for the fall. Learning to use the robot operating system (ROS) without a robot is... well, sort of silly. So, we've picked out a fairly low cost one (the GoPiGo, http://www.dexterindustries.com/gopigo/) that you can use to get up and running. This fall we will be teaching ROS using this simple robot. It should be fun and there are lots of projects you can build based on this robot such as the one shown below.
My first Kickstarter!
About a week ago I launched my first Kickstarter. I toyed with the idea a lot when we were raising money for EEx, but I never knew how to make backer rewards make sense for consumers, when our users were Chinese factories. The company I am with now, Dexter Industries, is the perfect kind of company to utilize the Kickstarter platform, and they have done it very well ever since they started. This was their fourth one, so I had a lot of catching up to do.
What I was most surprised with was just how exciting it is to watch the backers come pouring in. It's a really satisfying confirmation of your idea, so I highly recommend it for anyone with a consumer product or service.
I kind of wish there was a version of Kickstarter for business products and services. It would have been really interesting for EEx because we had so many companies that wanted to support what we were doing because what we were building would have helped them in a major way, but just not directly in the short term. We never could find the right model to engage these companies monetarily that could helped us in a tangible way.
Anyways, back to this one -- its called GoBox, the first robot subscription service. If you have kids, you might be familiar with the many monthly project subscription services like KiwiCrate. Every month you get a new project in the mail. I was talking to my sister in law about it a few years ago and she said her boys eagerly anticipated the arrival of their new project every month. So, when I joined Dexter back in March I floated the idea with John. He thought it was interesting, but didn't have any experience with subscriptions. We decided to test the idea on kickstarter to see if parents would pay $30/month for a full year to get a full robot kit and a monthly project to do with their children.
It took us a lot longer to get this going than anticipated, and a bigger initial financial investment than we initially planned. The main reasons were because we wanted to test it before we put it out there so we were confident that if people backed us, they would be getting a system of projects that really engaged and helped their children learn how to program.
First we had to find a curriculum developer, and my sister-in-law came to mind because she works as a technology teacher for an elementary school. She not only has a computer science background, but also has three kids and has the daily challenge of finding ways to keep them as well as her many classes in school engaged in learning about technology. She also happens to be a fantastic writer, so she was our first choice. Luckily she was available and able to help us get started.
Then we realized that these projects needed to be in the format of something more than a word document or webpage. We all have experienced the value of "LEGO-type” instructions with big pictures. We enlisted the help of the very talented illustrator, Drake, to be the lead designer of the physical project instructions. I have worked with him before (master artist behind the "energy monster" for EEx), and he's published a children's book as well! He's come up with some awesome art that makes me do the happy seal clap.
So, our Dexter engineering team worked closely with them to start developing a few of the lessons. There is sample code involved, so they are developing all of that, as well as drivers for the sensors that we are using in the monthly projects.
Once we had a few lessons done, we decided to test them out! Luckily, (or strategically, however you want to think of it) my office is in a local makerspace -- Nova Labs. We were able to put on a series of workshops where we invited parent/child teams to come try out GoBox! In the first workshop they built and tested the GoPiGo, which is the Raspberry Pi robot that comes with GoBox.
There were people of all skill levels -- from professional software engineers that wanted to do something cool with their kids on the weekend -- to parents that were totally new to technology and were intimidated at first. I was relieved when everyone was able to do it. However, we did learn more deeply about the importance of good video instructions. So, we've added that to the scope of work. Many people like to read, but there's a big group of people that like watching and listening to videos better. This was an important lesson.
The second session was really fun because it was a neat lesson with a light sensor, and taught concepts of biomimicry. We had the children choose an animal and then decorate the GoPiGo robot to look like that animal. Then they attached a light sensor and learned how to program the robot to react to light in the same way that animal would! By the end of the workshop we had bats, moths, cheetahs, and lots of other cool animals. We had boxes for them to use to cover their animal and change light levels. It was a blast for everyone.
The other neat lesson I learned from these workshops was the effectiveness of the strategy that Bridget used to write these lessons. First there is a little "instruction", and then an activity or something interactive to do or sketch out or think about and write down. Then there would be a little more instruction, and another mini interactive project. This really helped to break up the instructions and made the participants feel like they were making a lot of progress and break up the pure learning portions so they came in doses. Pretty cool to see this in effect. Any teacher that is reading this is probably laughing that this is even "insight" on my part because it is probably super obvious -- but you have to remember I studied Chinese... which was pretty much just about grunt work and repetition. Haha. Let's just say I am glad I didn't write these lessons. :)
After a few workshops under our belt, and seeing the effectiveness of the project based learning, we started to put together the bones of the Kickstarter, including most importantly the video!
I'm grateful we thought ahead and got some great video footage of the workshops so we had a lot of fun ways to show what we were trying to do, rather than to try to convince people that we know what we are doing.
As we were developing the video script and putting together the backer rewards we came up with the idea of changing the name of the monthly "lessons" to "missions". We tested that with some children and they got much more excited about the idea of doing a mission with their robot, then doing a lesson. So, we went back and changed as much as we could to insert the concept of missions, including what these actual projects consisted of and liked like.
Working back and forth on the video footage, animations and backer rewards was a ton of work, but also gave us a lot of time to really think about all aspects of the kickstarter.
Alongside all of this we were developing the second version of the GoPiGo, working with our manufacturing partner to confirm lead times, pricing and all the logistic details to actually delivering on our promise.
I felt very strongly that we needed to deliver the first GoBox mission (the GoPiGo2 robot kit) in time for the holidays. This was stressful because it means we had to place the order as soon as we hit our goal, and now I am in China to work with our factories to make sure it's all running smoothly!
I’m proud to say we hit our goal in the first few days and now we are excited to see how far we can go! We just announced our stretch goals, one of which came as I was preparing for my trip -- and wondering if people would find it interesting how these robots get made. I mean, these are all folks that are interested in learning, so figure this might be a cool way to learn even more.
Another neat thing that surfaced was interest from my 11-year old niece to do a project with the GoPiGo that I thought would be a great example of what kids can learn through the GoBox subscription. She visited me from Tampa a few weeks ago and we built the GoPiGo together. She took to it more than I anticipated, and was even up working on it all by herself one morning before the sun was up.
She wanted to use the GoPiGo to try and stop her little brother and sister from coming in her room and stealing her stuff. We ended up with a neat project that we turned into a movie, called “Stop the Mini Intruders”. Check out the trailer here -- the full (4 min) length comes out on Friday!
Also, my awesome husband and I made this totally dorky song, that we’ll consider including in the mission videos for GoBox.
This project has inspired many for me, and I hope it does so for many others!
We’re like the British Empire, the sun never sets on Dexter Industries.
Check out the article on Dexter Industries today in Arlington Now!
GoPiGo Phase 1
So I finished configuring my Raspbian Wheezy distribution to work for the GoPiGo, quite painless actually. What I did with my brand new NOOBS SD card, after booting and connecting it to the Internet, can be summarized in the following:
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade -y
$ sudo reboot (probably not necessary but just in case)
$ git clone https://github.com/DexterInd/GoPiGo.git
$ cd GoPiGo/Setup
$ sudo chmod +x install.sh
$ sudo ./install.sh
$ sudo reboot (in case it doesn’t restart on its own, like mine)
You can find these instructions here under Option 3.
Getting the Raspberry Pi B+ configured for the GoPiGo. Yes, we are very festive at work :-)