in the wee hours

The Archives

  • terribly early in the morning
    Bot Base Test Uncategorized | (0)
    Just a quick test vid of my bot base in action. It is currently connected to the computer via an Arduino through USB. I am able to control the servos by sending simple commands via the serial interface. This was just a test of the base as I got it a little while ago and I hadn't even powered it up yet. Next on the agenda is getting it wireless. Power shouldn't be an issue and I am planning on buying a wireless module from Sparkfun at some point in the near future. I just have to decide on whether it ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Robo News #7 Uncategorized | (0)
    Not sure if it actually is number 7 but, hey, as long as the entry is unique that is good enough for me :) Lots of news for everyone tonight!:  My team successfully finished the Oxfam Trailwalker over the weekend - The Trailwalker is a 100km walk for charity, we finished in 29hrs 45min which is not too shabby in my opinion. :) This relates to ausrobotics because I can now be 100% focused on the site again! - Click the link for more info - Our team was called 'Team Viper' Dexter Learns to Walk! - This video/article of Dexter, one ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Latest Humanoid clips Uncategorized | (0)
    I'm now putting some more effort into the "storyboard" part of my animator s/w. As the gentle reader may gather, I'm trying to create "movies" of simple but non-trivial type fairly automatically. The storyboard s/w must take a series of clips, along with their internal descriptions (i.e. the goals that were satisfied to generate them via the planner along with the state of the world at start and end), and massage them to preserve continuity and other things. E.g. if a character (presently all characters are Robotis or robots of some kind, of course) has a beer in its left hand ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Humanoid walking better Uncategorized | (0)
    After some more bug hunting and fixing, the Humanoid sim is walking better. A few things are running off on the render engine as I type this, and I'll come back and add the links later. Among more problems found was a side-effect of one of the low-pass filters I'd added to some of the data pathways. As I mentioned a couple items back, the robot initially showed some "jitter" in deciding which of its feet was the one that was actually doing the balancing. This happened because the feet and floor in the V.R. are perfectly smooth, and some ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Vimeo support added (apparently) Uncategorized | (4)
    Hello! Good news: I have updated the embedded media module to support Vimeo videos just like it already supports YouTube. Bad news: It doesn't work for some reason. Good news: I will fix it. :)  More Good news: fixed :)
  • terribly early in the morning
    Humanoid walking Uncategorized | (0)
    After 2 major and 13 minor re-writes the simulated Bioloid Humanoid seems to be walking and talking realistically. I've embedded some refs to the vimeo clips of the relevant actions. Among the major problems turned out to be the calc of angular momentum. Due to a mistook on my part, it was summing components over un-aligned axes. Hence the "turning" of the Humanoid was out of all propotion to the actions of its feet against the floor. I also needed to add a low pass filter in the loop between simulating a servo's (incremental) movement and detecting the loading on ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Getting there… Uncategorized | (7)
    The new site is coming together nicely. You can check the progress out here if you are interested. I need to fix up some of the other pages still so don't stress if anything is weird or breaks. Also I welcome any suggestions on site features you would like to see implemented. A feature I am considering is something called "Project Pages" where you can easily link posts together into a cohesive project with a description, pictures etc. That way all the posts relating to say, Kym's humanoid project, could be found and listed on one page without having to ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Trying Vimeo video site Uncategorized | (0)
    Thanks for the info, ash. I've uploaded my first vid to vimeo and everything went smoothly. There are a couple of concerns -- they seem to limit you to 500 mb per week, and some of the doc seems to indicate a similar overall limit applies to your final stored vid files. Unlike YouTube they have a restricted video format list, but at least the way I've been doing things seems to have been accepted. It takes 90 mins or more before you can see an uploaded vid, so I'm still waiting to see the result of this first test. One thing I like ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    Spider Envy Uncategorized | (3)
    Wow look at the motion control on this one. :) I posted about Matt Denton's awesome spider bot before on AusRobotics. This time he has taught it to draw. I just cant't get over how nicely he has a) designed and machined it and b) programmed it to move. The motion (especially at the end when it zooms out a bit) is exactly how you imagine it will look when these things start coming over the hills with their lasers firing ;) I definitely feel that we are entering an age where more and more people will be fusing artistry with the normal ...
  • terribly early in the morning
    YouTube down again Uncategorized | (2)
    OK, this is no longer just stoopid, it's getting to be a bother! YouTube seems to be down yet again. From my random sample it seems the site has been unavailable for most functions except viewing for the past 3 weeks. What's the deal? Do they now schedule regular downtime for the 16 hrs of the day that don't correspond with 9-5 pacific time? If and when I find something reliable, and also better quality than Google videos I'm going to have to migrate everything across... The Humanoid is now walking and turning OK (2 completely different sets of issues ...