AusRobotics

I meant to mention the other day that I have finally fixed up the new site and it is now progressing well again (and displaying in all relevant browsers as far as I can see).

At one point I thought I might be able to complete dev on it by the Sunday just gone but I ran out of time due to some unexpected integration hiccups (I upgraded to Wordpress 2.6 which broke the forum integration again because they keep changing their cookie format).

If you get a spare second please check it out at: http://www.fatmode.com/ (One of my test domains :)

Please note that I am just about to reinstall Wordpress 2.5.1 to fix the integration issue so the site may be up and down and all over the place this week.

Also my web host has had some down and extremely slow time this week so if you have been having trouble reaching ausrobotics, that's the reason.

In robot news I went to hook up my xbees for some proper testing only to find that they have a different pin spacing from most of my stuff.... damn :)

W00t. My XBee modules arrived from Sparkfun today and man are they smaller than I was expecting.

For some reason I thought they would be about 5x6cm or so like my arduino but the units are only 3x2.5cm.

I also bought a USB adapter board for one of them to minimise the buggering around before I could set them up. I'm gonna plug it in now so I'll let you know how it goes!

• XBees at sparkfun.com
• Maxstream/Digi XBee platform

BP Australia has set up a nice site where you can remote-control one of several "surveyor" robots they have running around a diarama.

I have an early "version 1" of these things, and a friend has a 2nd gen  blackfin version. But neither behaves like the beasties on the game site.

Oh yes. There's a bit of a queue... :)

See http://www.bpexplorer.com.au/.

Going back (the 2nd day) to edit up something to put on YouTube found my supposed-mpeg files from the truckbot mission were unreadable.

Funny -- I was sure I'd managed to play them on the laptop 24 hrs earlier. But, regardless, they couldn't be played or shoved into a video editor today.

So I had to go back and do it again.

Since the conversion seems to run on almost real time (i.e. 60 mins of video as an .VOB file takes 30-60 mins of time on the Win klaptop to make into an mpeg4 avi), I've only managed to edit together something that was also on the same DVD at the start -- vision from my "catguard" experiments.

So that's what I'm pointing at today.

Basically, the "catguard" (maybe later will mysteriously transform to a "kitchguard" or "houseguard") is meant to look after my kitten. Presently, some of the neighbouring toms have been following it into the house late at night either to steal its food or beat it up or both.

I managed to cook up a simple Bioloid that used IR and light sensors to detect suspicious commings and goings and make a noise and wave an arm if so.

After some last-minute hacking to get my s/w to smoothly integrate 3-point turns plus smooth PID-type turning, the Ford truckbot was sent out Wed night to circle the block.

The mission met with "mixed success". While the turning code worked OK, the bot lost contact with the base AP at a range of only 50 m, so executed an "abort" and shut down on the nearest of the 4 corners on the block.

Like most of my robot s/w, the ultimate controlling is done by some goal-oriented Prolog. And one of the (several) great things about Prolog programming is the ease with which you can hack in a correction to a complex set of instructions. (I.e. "clauses" nearer the top of the source file take precedence over those later in the code; you can also ensure a given "hack" clause causes later alternatives to be simply dropped. This is all pretty much a hacker's dream and a maintance programmer's nightmare :).

So it was only a matter of seconds before the idea of simply "aborting" was short-circuited unless there was REAL trouble (i.e. none of a shortlist of things that could actually be ignored for the night).

Ausrobotics v2 in Firefox 2.0.0.14

Ausrobotics v2 in Firefox 3.0

Wow. Did someone change the rendering back end for Firefox suddenly without telling me? I thought these things were supposed to be compatible? (Famous last words...)

(Damn, I could have sworn I published this on Thurs... Too many late nights.)

A quick Robo News tonight. Servo Mag has this special available for a(n unknown) limited time. What do you guys reckon?

• Should we enter our "Menagerie"?
  
• Do you we have a "Menagerie" yet?
  
• Should we "invent" a "Menagerie"? :)

SERVO Magazine - THE magazine for robotics - would like to extend a special offer to (Robot Club's Name). Our exclusive SERVO Six Pack offers your members the following benefits:

A $us150 3" sq mobo featuring TI's OMAP3 has just been announced, and for once you can actually "buy it now".

While not aimed for controller-type applications, the OMAP3 features a 65 nm low-power 600 MHz ARM9 with graphics and DSP co-processors.

The board incl an LCD i/f, SD slot for digital cameras, USB 2 OTG (i.e. host+device), audio in/out, DVI and analog video out.

See: http://beagleboard.org/ .

A few new items have come in over the past week or so, and actually recording one of my "bigbot"'s night missions (i.e. when the roads and footpaths are clear of kibbizters and their pets) is now green-lighted.

Some of the recent devices include a couple of IR-assisted wifi cameras. For 20 usd they aren't TOO bad, bad at least one suffers from the problem of "hum" over the audio circuit.

It seems the PWM used to power the IR lamps manages to make its way over the wifi to the destination at about 3db below (i.e. "not much, really") the actual noises of interest. But the 4Mpx image is nice and sharp, so I can't complain there.

The wifi has a 200 mw transmitter so should be able to go the full 200 m of my block (don't want to be crossing any unofficial dragstrips during the early am's, either).

Both units have a bit of a drain on a 12v supply -- 5-10w each, mostly for the lamps, of course.

So it may have been wiser to just have an IR-sensitive camera and an external (compatible) IR lamp mounted on a tripod, or somthing.

Anyway, I'm set to record mission 3 of the Ford, which is slated for sometime next week.

After a couple of experiments and a few mis-starts, I figure I'm ready to circle the block on full auto. :)

Whooooo!

Ok, just trying to fire everyone up there. Not sure if it worked or not but it was worth a shot :) Ok, here's the update!

Still trying to work out the v2 site issues. They seem to only manifest under FF2 and non XP OSs (correct me if I am wrong). I am sure it will be simple in the end but I haven't had too much time to work on it.

Does this guy ever sleep? (Do I for that matter?). Incessant inventor, CrabFu managed to bust out the PutterBot seemingly overnight. It's movements are awesome but like his other creations it is remote controlled, it would be great to remake this little guy and fully automate it.

Somebody did what I only threatened to and stuck the Wowee animatronic Chimp head onto a Roomba. I have no words for the result but if I did they would probably rhyme with 'Awesome' and 'Totally'.