in the wee hours

The Archives

  • just before lunchtime
    Animation tools & video codecs Uncategorized | (4)
    We all knew it would come down to this. Over the past week or so I've been starting on an animation tool for Bioloids -- but maybe it'll work for any robot that has an XML description. And maybe not. :) With the various compiler/decompiler and planning tools starting to be squared away, I decided it'd be nice to have a SAFE playground for my quadbot to roam around in, debugging s/w, than periodically racing around the granny flat and crashing into things. Those plastic brackets LOOK soft, but are pretty sharp when the thing springs its 1 kg at ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Motion compiler/decompiler Uncategorized | (0)
    Yesterday mostly worked on a sister tool to the BCP compiler -- a compiler/decopiler for the Robotis Motion (.mtn) language. As for the BCP compiler, the "M" compiler takes a simple text language and generates a .hex file in S-record format, that can be uploaded by the CM-5 bootloader using "load E000". The first tests of the new tool have been done, and at least the Robotis Motion Editor can see the uploaded pages OK, apart from "linked" pages. I'd included a feature where a sequence of "poses" was automatically broken up over pages (a Motion page contains up to ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Myquad — exploring “on its own” Uncategorized | (0)
    My simple quad is now able (?) to explore on its own. The attached vids don't look like the 4 weeks of hacking it took to get it to go even this slowly, but at least all the h/w and s/w components are in place. Let's just say this project exhibits "the iceberg syndrome" -- 90% of the trickiness just doesn't appear in the visible result. :) It obviously needs a lot more tuning and fiddling. The kinda thing I only love when I'm in a melancholoic mood and it's been raining for weeks on end. The basic outline of ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Getting started with AVRs Uncategorized | (4)
    This weekend I decided to bite the bullet and get an AVR (A popular microcontroller similar to a PIC) project working. Sure I have an arduino but I wanted to prove to myself that I didn't need the fancy dev environment and support hardware/firmware to get something done. Plus when you are developing with the bare bones required the end result can sometimes be much smaller, something I need for one of my current projects. A couple of weeks ago I ordered a AVR ISP (in system programmer) kit from AdaFruit Industries to program an AVR I had bought from Jaycar. ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Warranty issues with i-Sobot; progress on “myquad” s/w Uncategorized | (0)
    It seems Trossenrobotics don't support warranty claims on their sales. My i-Sobot froze a servo a couple of days back, and I tried to approach Trossen to get it repaired under the 90-day warranty. But they turned me down and I was directed to Tomy's (US) freecall number. I've non-freecalled and emailed Tomy US via their new "consumer" address. But no response so far. Unfortunately the warranty states it's valid only for a "US sale" and seems to require the input from a US-side seller to proceed. So it seems the warranty is not valid for owners outside the US like ...
  • just before lunchtime
    KHR2 first steps; iSobot feezes a servo Uncategorized | (1)
    Some good news and some bad news. First, the bad news. I was cooking up another interesting demo of computer-controlled remote control (i.e. via some vision recognition, a Linux PC was sending out IR codes to get a robot to do some simple tasks -- like kick coloured skittles) when my poor old Tomy iSobot -- almost fresh out of the box -- decided to freeze a servo. I first noticed it kept falling over for no apparent reason. Only looking closer did I see the right thigh servo could move ONE direction, but not the other. By hand it seems something has ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Slow progress with KHR2 Uncategorized | (1)
    More slow progress over the past 24 hrs. I fixed a few bugs with my just-released Bioloid compiler -- itsn't that always the way, you only spot the problems AFTER you've listed it somewhere -- and added a couple of enhancements. Not much feedback from the Bioloid groups. I'd expected something other than "please add a random number generator" (function not available in underlying bytecode interpreter, so fat chance) and "great! but my first priority is to put a GUI on it" (i.e. after a few weeks effort we'll be back to where we started with a compiler with a unproductive ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Bioloid compiler/de-compiler Uncategorized | (8)
    I'm making first use of the File Manager to upload a simple Bioloid compiler and de-compiler. The packages (Unix-style tgz gzip-ed tar files) have the names bcpcomp-VERS and bcpdump-VERS and comes with a couple of examples, the sources, but no documentation. People working on Robotis Bioloids might be interested to use the compiler as a ref to the bytecode format used by the Behaviour Control Program; from what I read around the blogs this has been needed for some time. The compiler was written to ease the load of writing a couple of RPC servers, so it hasn't been tested much. ...
  • just before lunchtime
    Vids of ASIMO at Chadstone Shopping Centre Uncategorized | (0)
    YouTube has added multi-upload support and increased their file limit to 1GB so I managed to finally upload these files without re-encoding them first. The movies are all of the ASIMO demo last month at Chadston Shopping Centre, Melbourne. All movies (and photos) were taken by AusRobotics' famed field reporter, Grace Chen (thanke Grace!).  
  • just before lunchtime
    Myquad moves via zigbee RPC control Uncategorized | (0)
    Another maybe less-than-inspiring vid. After a few hrs of wasted time using the wrong Unix device, I *finally* managed to hook the low-level Zig2Serial knowhow with an RPC server to make my simple quad move. The s/w breaks down into a server written in Robotis  Behaviour Control language that just sits and responds to requests to perform the basic functions -- load timers, move servos to given positions, read loadings and temps -- and returns simple status messages with responses. An RPC lib on a Linux/Unix box allows me to write simple C/C++ code that behaves as though it's downloaded ...