[Noisebridge-discuss] Noise-bot 2? (was "RAM me please")

[Jared Dunne]

Nice, Jake..  Thanks for the info.

It seems reasonable to accept the current limits and try to maximize
what can be done with it.

What nights are you guys typically hacking on it?  I'd love to plan
some time to get a robot crash course to bring me up to speed in more
detail.

Jared-

On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 2:36 AM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
> ouch, that video was traumatic for several reasons.
>
> this is however very impressive considering it was done in 1997.  Of course
> hardware has come a very very long way since then (MIT/DIdeas "Cheap Vision
> Machine" is a 50 MFLOP digital signal processor with 256K words of SRAM and
> a memory-mapped RGB frame grabber).
>
> The question is, can our programmers do what was done then?  I think we can,
> and it doesn't matter what hardware we use.
>
> I would of course love to build more robots, and I can (and I have the parts
> to do so) but I would not want to divert our programmers from the goal of
> making robotkind more interesting, to making them more prolific.
>
> Regarding the nimbility of the robot, I realize that the thing has
> demonstrated extreme clumsiness in the past, but the python script governing
> those movements (controlled through an SSH connection) is almost deprecated.
>  A new system is being developed by Lilia which controls direction and
> velocity (technically rotational velocity and forward velocity) with a real
> number, and runs in the background and can be passed updated values from
> whatever program is controlling the robots desires.
>
> As I was able to "dock" the robot to its electrical outlet using only its
> joystick the other day, I know that it will be quite nimble when controlled
> through proper software.  As for its size, it will remind us to keep the
> space wheelchair-accessible.
>
> Jared, you mention that you want to help with the software side of a robot;
>  your opportunity is here.  Lilia is working on certain things already but I
> can steer you toward areas of need depending on what you're good at, and we
> can do some interesting things i'm sure.
>
> As for 360 degree sonar and/or bump sensors, we are working on a bump-skirt
> right now, and putting sonar on this robot would be a lot easier than
> building a new robot and putting sonar onto it.
>
> So... I think we should use the robot we already have and continue to
> improve its software.
>
> Once we get enough robot software working to need to branch our code, I will
> be very excited to build another one.  I have plenty of parts.
>
> -jake
>
> On Thu, 17 Feb 2011, Jared Dunne wrote:
>
>> Jake-
>>
>> I don't know if you were seriously considering building a new robot or
>> not. But it got me thinking
>> about if Noisebridge collectively could design and build a more nimble
>> robot?  It brought to mind robots I used in some robotics classes at
>> Northwestern named "Hack" & "Kludge". heh.
>>
>> Here's an short paper on them:
>> http://www.aaai.org/Papers/AAAI/1997/AAAI97-122.pdf
>>
>> Here's a video of Kludge playing fetch:
>> http://www.cs.northwestern.edu/~ian/kludge-with-kids.mpg
>>
>> It has some of the specs in the writeup but the key features about
>> that robot that I found cool:
>> - It's roughly the size of a medium sized trash can.
>> - It can rotate in place to the right and left, and drive forward and
>> backward.
>> - It has 360' sonar sensors to avoid getting too close to things.
>> - It has 360' bump sensors to prevent further crushing if impact does
>> happen.
>> - It has a forward facing surveillance camera for eyes, but we could
>> replace that with the Kinect in our design.
>> - It was controlled with an on board laptop similar to MC Hawking.
>>
>> I alone don't have the mastery of skills needed in the electrical and
>> fabrication department, but I would love to help with the software
>> side of things and also assist with building/design as much as
>> possible.  I feel that the skills needed to make something like this
>> happen exist within the Noisebridge community.  Is there serious
>> interest though?
>>
>> Curious,
>> Jared-
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 4:18 PM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Unfortunately the PCI7E mainboard which is currently in the robot is only
>>> compatible with up to 1GB ram cards.  I assume that putting in a 2GB card
>>> would either not work, or only come up as 1GB.
>>>
>>> I guess I should weigh the option of a laptop as opposed to the mini-ITX
>>> it
>>> currently uses, but I tried a laptop before and there were issues with
>>> the
>>> power button and stuff like that.  Also I would have to migrate away form
>>> a
>>> parallel port (i assume) which we are using for the chair control.
>>>
>>> I do have a 2.5" SATA disk though, and Andy has one as well, so perhaps
>>> we
>>> should just make another robot?  A Russian one perhaps?  I can certainly
>>> get
>>> another wheelchair...
>>>
>>> On Tue, 15 Feb 2011, Dr. Jesus wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Jake <jake at spaz.org> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> dear everyone
>>>>>
>>>>> the robot is hungry and it wants chips.
>>>>>
>>>>> RAM chips!!  specifically, one ram card of one Gigabyte, DDR2 533 (it
>>>>> only
>>>>> has one slot and it already has a 512 in that slot) It has to be a
>>>>> 240-pin
>>>>> type, with a single notch in the bottom. (not laptop memory, it's
>>>>> desktop
>>>>> memory we're talking about)
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't know what DDR2 or 533 means, but if you have a 240-pin 1GB
>>>>> memory
>>>>> card, I would love to try it and i'll give it back if it doesn't work.
>>>>
>>>> I've got some 2GB DDR2 DIMMs. I'll bring them tonight before the
>>>> meeting.
>>>>
>>>>> Also looking for a mini-ITX motherboard which is hella fast.  This one
>>>>> uses a VIA C7 and we're trying to do some heavy 3D imagining using the
>>>>> Kinect so the thing can imagine where it is.
>>>>
>>>> I've got a few laptops you could use.  They all have Core 2 Duo chips
>>>> in them, but they need 2.5" SATA disks.  Do you have any?
>>>
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>