in the wee hours

The Archives

  • terribly early in the morning
    Humanoid starting to move Uncategorized | (0)
    YouTube seems to be back on the air, so I've FINALLY managed to upload the clips from the last wk-10 days. With the uploading holdup (the Google video site doesn't seem quite up to the standard of YouTube, BTW) I haven't managed to make much more progress than the "disaster" in vid #7. As I propbably mentioned elsewhere, dealing with extended surfaces on which a bot balances now seems beyond the previous trick of selecting a few points (e.g. the corners) on the surfaces that are expected to be in contact with the floor, and then calling those points ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Drupal to Wordpress migration Pt. II Uncategorized | (0)
    Ok well the migration is going well. I have an instance of Wordpress 2.5 (brand new shiny beta - the final is due any day now) running on one of my test sites and have written a nice little Python script that migrates all of the data and adds any extras that are needed. One of my graphic designer friends has offered to help me with the design of the new site so prepare for some awesome. I will probably cut over before we get it finalised though because of the benefits I can see of using Wordpress as opposed to ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Youtube seems to be broken Uncategorized | (0)
    The robot playing has been proceeding, if slowly, over the past wk/10 days. It's a pity the same can't be said for those guys at Youtube. Every time I've tried to use it since before the Easter break it's been "the site is undergoing maintainance; that feature isn't available". Including uploads. So it looks like I'll have to investigate moving to alternative sites -- plenty of them available, I'm sure. My problem will be the volume. Already, it seems, my 80-100 vids seems to put me in the top .1% of YouTube clients. A similar thing happened when I was ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Evil Mad Scientist Labs business card AVR breakout board Uncategorized | (3)
    Apart from having a really cool name, Evil Mad Scientist Labs also have a whole lot of cool kits. The latest is a business card/AVR breakout board that makes prototyping your latest AVR project a snap.The board's black silkscreen looks nice and futuristic and, as with most AVR projects, all you will need to get it to work is the board, a chip and power. Programming is via an ISP programmer like the USBTiny I bought late last week from AdaFruit Industries.If you need more information on how to get started then check out Evil Mad Scientst Labs for ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Ikalogic Uncategorized | (0)
    Ibrahim Kamal from Ikalogic.com kindly asked me if I could link to his site from here so here it is. :) His site has a good selection of original electronics and robotics articles covering sensors, motor control, navigation and more. Check it out here: http://www.ikalogic.com/
  • terribly early in the morning
    AusRobotics Drupal to Wordpress migration Uncategorized | (3)
    Hi everyone! Hope you are having a great extended easter weekend! I have spent a bit of the weekend investigating Wordpress as an alternative to Drupal for running AusRobotics and have finally decided to take the plunge switch systems. Drupal, to be quite frank, has turned out to be an enormous pig of a CMS which I feel is hindering the development of the site. OpenSource software is great because it is free etc. but it can really be a pain in the rear to dig around in a million forums just to find out what module is required ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Budget Robotics base Uncategorized | (1)
    Hi again, apologies for the recent lack of postings. We have had people staying over for the last two weeks and it has been a bit less robo-centric. Not robo-less of course!     I received my Budget Robotics ScooterBot kit last Wednesday so I thought I would write a mini-review and post some pics show it off. (I am in no way affiliated with BudgetRobotics and this review is just my opinion - just so you know :) Going off my Amazon deliveries (and other deliveries in the past), I wasn't expecting anything for at least a couple of weeks or ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Debugging & the courage of convictions Uncategorized | (0)
    Fixing knotty bugs in your own s/w is sometimes just a matter of holding to the courage of your convictions. The humanoid sim has proved a case in point. I'd quickly dashed off some basic poses for the Bioloid Humanoid -- by running some AVR s/w in simulation through my animator tool -- and it looked funny, but I figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to fix it up. A day + a few hours later and I wasn't so sure. After trying "by hand" to locate the problem -- that poses I'd selected looked "close" but "strange" -- ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    More humanoid than humanoid Uncategorized | (0)
    [2nd attempt] Some hacking on the Humanoid sim over the long weekend. The attached vids show the usual joint testing plus a couple of the simpler Robotis "poses" put to the simulated bot. The final sequence on the 2nd attached vid shows the "hello" sequence that runs about 50 poses long. Normally, it can be interrupted by things like hand-clapping and shining lights into its eyes, but here these things are disconnected from the s/w. After a review it seems the assembler part of the s/w has made a "silent error". It's ended up haning the legs in the air ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Interesting robot design article on this weeks Science Show Uncategorized | (7)
    Hi Everyone, An article on The Science Show (Radio National, Australia) this week should be interesting to you all. Taking stock of the state of home robotics. Particularly good was the bit about using very low quality robotic components and balancing the performance out with computation. Click a link at the top of the page listen to the audio: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2008/2183681.htm