This weekend’s robot hackathon was a huge success. Not only did everyone who participated have a blast, but we actually ended up with a nifty little robot too. You can also check out Eric’s blog post on the event as well as this fantastic set of flickr photos. Here’s a clip of the robot in action in one of our early tests:

The robot in the video runs on a set of powered train track rails. Power is drawn from the rails into the Arduino and the motor shield atop the carriage (photo: motorizing the carriage). The arduino is our robot “brain” (photo: coding the brain) that issues all the movement and LED blink commands (yes, any robot worth its salt MUST have blinking LEDs). While we now have several feet of track installed, this turned out to be a difficult job since hacklab apparently has  a 4″ thick concrete ceiling. But thanks to a lot of hard work (photo: drilling the ceiling) it’s now rock solid and looks awesome. The idea is to lay additional track that will eventually allow the robot to drive along the ceiling all over the lab. Our “use case” is a robot that can be commanded to head over to the desks, pick up empty pop cans and ferry them over to the recycling bin (more about that in a moment).

After the above video was taken, we started to outfit the robot with additional capabilities and sensors. The first was a Sharp IR distance sensor that we’d like to use for robot positioning along the track. The second was this little contraption (see if you can guess what it is before scrolling further):

This little gadget is actually a winch that can raise or lower a bucket from the robot. In our proposed  pop can pickup “use case” the winch is what will enable the robot to pick up and deliver pop cans to the recycling bin. …what? “ugly” you say?  Not to us. What it lacks in sleek lines and striking curves is overshadowed by character and performance. As an example, if you look carefully, on the left side of the spool we have a heart shaped piece of acrylic that serves as our motor hub (yes, every self respecting robot needs a heart)! And equally cool is that just above it we have a limit switch with a roller on it that tracks along the edges of the heart as the spool turns, sending our robot three electronic “clicks” each rotation (two at the top of the heart and one at the bottom) that help us encode/track the position of the winch. It also has a homing switch at the top to allow the robot to figure out where the bucket is after a reboot.  So will it lift a pop can? You bet!  The heaviest object we tested with it was the fire extinguisher …which it lifted without a problem!

And of course, this is just the beginning. We have lots of code left to write, track to lay, and sensors to add. We also plan to give the robot a xbee wireless connection so we can issue it commands from within the lab as well. Adding a pan/tilt laser pointer atop the robot is also on our to-do list.

Thanks to everyone for an awesomely fun weekend, and feel free to roll up your sleeves and join us on this project as Hacklab’s Train Overlord continues to evolve!

Eight people met tonight and we decided on a plan for hacklab’s new robot overlord. Some of us will be meeting at 9am to start the shopping expedition (first stop: George’s Trains). We’ll be reconvening at or before 1pm tomorrow (Saturday) in order to start construction.

The robot will be a gondola robot, hanging from train track suspended from the ceiling. It’ll have a winch, enabling it to raise and lower a load up and down. We envision an ultimate application being to carry empty pop cans from the desk to the recycling bins :-)

At least four different teams will work in parallel:
– suspended track construction
– gondola train mechanism
– motor control electronics & programming
– winch mechanism

Once the robot is moving, we have a super long list of cool features to add such as responding to light & sound, wireless control via ZigBee, pan & tilt laser “eye”, eyebrows for expression, R2D2 sound effects, etc. Hopefully we will get to some of that fun stuff tomorrow!

If you’re keen to learn about robotics or get put to work in any way on a robot, please show, we can totally find something for you to do! 1pm tomorrow, Saturday April 8th, 2011.

UPDATE: Notes from this session as well as a detailed online tutorial have now been posted at:  http://wiki.goodrobot.com/wiki/Servos

To reserve your spot for this free workshop please confirm through eventbrite:
http://arduinoservo.eventbrite.com

This workshop is for anyone who would like to make things move using hobby servos.  Attendance is free and limited to 11 people. Beginners at any level are welcome, though ideally you will have a very basic familiarity with Arduino (for example, you might have tried something like the arduino blink tutorial).

The workshop will be held at Hacklab (170a Baldwin St) 7pm-9pm April 18th. Hacklab is located in Kensington Market, a few blocks SW of College and Spadina. For directions see:                                   http://hacklab.to/location/

In this workshop we will discuss hobby servos, how they work, and what they can be used for. Then we will use our Arduino (an open hardware platform) to control them. For those interested in working with robotics or making things move, controlling servos with arduino is a great first step.
Please bring:
– A laptop (make sure you have downloaded and installed the Arduino Software: see arduino.cc )
– An arduino (Creatron sells them on College St just a few doors east of Spadina)

I’ll supply a variety of servos that you can experiment with. See you there!

Hacklab is having a Summer BBQ! Mark your calendars!

Get some sun on that pale Hacker skin, enjoy the lake breeze, and have some fun on Toronto Island! I’ve booked a picnic site on Toronto Island for us on Saturday, June 11. I’ll arrange the necessary gear to provide cooking heat and bring some basic food tems. You can bring your own grillables and drinkables as well, and we can have some hacker gourmet action.

Bring a guest… bring lots of guests. Our permit allows us to have up to 100 people on our site.

There’s tons to do:

• Find the island geocaches!
• Do some hiking!
• Go check out the weird little community on Ward’s Island!
• Fall in the water! Be attacked by geese and swans!
• Check into Foursquare from a boat!
• Bring throwable objects to test and refine the strange built-in human ability to predict a ballistic trajectory well enough to actually snatch a flying object out of the air! It may improve your Angry Birds score!
• Bring your computers and set up an ad-hoc LAN Party! (no generators, please!)
• Build yourself a kite (there are tons of plans on the interweb), attach an Arduino or digital camera, and have some aerial fun!
• Take cool photos of the Toronto skyline!
• Try out the sketchy Centre Island rides and petting zoo!

Date: Saturday, June 11 2011
Time: 2pm – 7pm
Where: Olympic Island, Picnic Site 18

How to get there: Take the Centre Island ferry from the bottom of Bay Street. Our site is about a 5 minute walk from the ferry dock. Just follow the paths to the left and cross the little bridge onto Olympic Island.

What to bring:

• Sunscreen and a Hat
• Tasty beverages (park rules say they must be non-alcholic)
• Lots of water
• Insect repellant
• Snacks
• Things to Grill
• Outdoor Amusements
• Bicycle or in-line skates

If you want to bring your own cooking equipment, it must be charcoal or wood powered.

What NOT to bring, according to the park rules:

• Amplified music or PA system
• Inflatable games, dunk tanks, generators, tents or tarps
• Outside caterers
• Compressed flammable gasses (they are not allowed on the ferry)
• Ballons, decorations, or signage
• Alcoholic beverages

Feel free to contact me if you’d like to help out with organization or logistics… I’d appreciate it!

On April 25th, at 7pm/1900, I will be doing an integral transform workshop. This workshop will introduce ideas like convolution and the Fourier Transform (and possibly L² Spaces, the Laplace transforms or Fourier Series). Examples of applications will include solving PDEs.

Integral Transforms and the Fourier transform in particular are very powerful ideas. The Fourier transform changes from looking at functions in terms of amplitudes at points in time to amplitudes at frequencies. It has applications to audio and image processing; see examples of what it does to these images (though note that the author is using discrete 2D Fourier transforms, which are a little different from what I’ll be showing).

They’re also very useful in ODEs and PDEs, making them invaluable in physics, including electronics.

NOTE: You should know what derivatives and integrals are if you intend to come to this workshop. I’m really sorry, but I simply won’t have time to teach introductory calculus and cover this material. And it isn’t nice for people who do know calculus if I try to do so.

Check out our new Hacklab Toronto video! See inside the lab, meet a few of our members and check out some of the cool stuff we do. Hacklab Toronto is open to the public every Tuesday night starting at 1800h. Come down and meet us sometime!

Come one, come all and help build a robotic denizen for hacklab! Announcing the first ever robot hackathon at hacklab. We’ll be gathering on Friday April 8th 7pm-onward to brainstorm and discuss what to do, and then all day Saturday April 9th to hack on our robot! Alan and I will be running the session, thanks also to Rob and Geordie who will hopefully be there as well.

The plan is basically to make a robot of some sort that will be a permanent resident of hacklab. A possible idea is to make a “spider bot” that would live above the bar area, roving back and forth on a clothes-line type of thing. It would be able to raise and lower itself from the line, and could have light and sound sensors to enable it to respond to it’s environment. It would be Arduino based in order to make it easily hackable. Bonus points if it can lower itself into a charging port when needed! But this is just one idea, if we can come up with something better that would awesome! We’re keen to have something fun to show off at the hacklab party later that month.

If you’re at all interested in robotics, please come! No experience necessary, we will be forming small teams so that more experienced people can help less experienced people learn, in the true spirit of hacklab. Stay for as little or as long as you like. If you’ve got stuff to donate to our cause (motors, batteries, electronics, etc.) that would be super awesome as well. The more stuff we get the less we will have to buy and the more things our robot will be able to do!

So mark your calendars for April 8th and 9th and prepare for your new hacklab robot overlords :-)

I’m going to be running an openSCAD workshop on April 4th at 19:00.

OpenSCAD is a lot like a programming language except that instead of compiling into software it compiles into a 3D object. You have if statements, loops and functions. For a lot of purposes, it is way easier than using traditional 3D modeling software.

For example, it’s what the Hacklab RepRap is being developed in.

No reservations are necessary. It would be preferable for you to install it before coming (Ubuntu Users: there’s no package in the archives but you can use this PPA).

I hope to see you there!

The soldering workshops are coming up real soon! The women’s workshop is coming up this Monday. The general audience workshop is a week from Monday, on March 21st. Please RVSP today, space is limited and the last soldering workshop was filled to capacity!

This coming Monday the 21st is the Arduino Workshop II. There is ONE ticket remaining ($20 to cover materials).

Monday Feb 28th, Chris will be doing a workshop on the mathematics behind fractals. It isn’t just pretty pictures, it’s pretty math too! Chris will post more details later.

Monday March 7th, I’ll be leading a workshop for hacklab members only on how to use the laser cutter. We’ll be using Inkscape to draw shapes, an Inkscape plugin to generate gcode, and of course EMC2 to do the laser cutting. By the end of the workshop you’ll be able to operate the laser cutter by yourself.

Monday March 14th, Leigh will be leading a Soldering Workshop for Women. Gents never fear because…

Monday March 21st, I’ll be leading another Soldering Workshop which anyone can attend. Both soldering workshops will have the same selection of kits as before (Bliplace, TV-be-Gone, Trippy RBG Wave, Truth Kit, North Paw).

More details (including eventbrite RSVP links) to follow as the dates get closer.