Mounting all the electronics and batteries onto your robot can often be a pain in the ass. Drilling dozens of holes, measuring them all out to line up perfect, spacers, nuts, bolts, ack! Then taking it all apart when you have to work on something… we discovered a better way to secure things down on our bots which is much faster. Using a Sorbothane sheet and some Velcro you can fasten down just about anything very securely. Then, when you need to take it off to work on it’s super easy. No need to try to get in there with screw drivers and wrenches.

You can find our Velcro and Rubber sheets here.

In this increasingly technologically saturated world, electronic communication has become a vital part of our lives.  Communication between sentient carbon-based life forms such as ourselves is fairly straightforward, but what about communication between the electronic devices that surround us?

Making Things Talk, a new book from the fine people who bring us Make Magazine, demystifies device level communications with a series of fun projects presented (as always) in a friendly, nonthreatening manner.

If you haven’t checked this book out yet, we highly recommend it.  You’ll learn how to make a video game out of a stuffed monkey, add a web cam to your cat, and by the time you’re done, you’ll be tracking your grandmother by GPS and your underwear drawer will be sending you status updates via email.

It’s a good primer for all sorts of communication methods; from short range communication using IR, Zigbee, and Bluetooth, to communicating over vast distances over the Internet.  It’s also a good way to get familiar with basic electronic prototyping, microcontrollers, and TTL-level serial communication.

Making Things Talk is not an exhaustive encyclopedia, but more of a well-rounded cookbook.  If you’re a beginner, it will help you get your feet wet.  If you’re more experienced, it should still teach you a few new tricks.

Buy your copy of Making Things Talk at the Make store.

Announcing September Winners !

We thought judging last month's entries was tough, but we had no idea what we were in for this month.  As usual, the Trossen Robotics staff scored projects from our "Project Showcase" forum on a scale of 0-5 for documentation, coolness, ingenuity, and creativity.  These were all very, very close.  Just remember: we loved all of your projects, and as far was I'm concerned, you're all winners.  Enough inane chatter; here are the results of September's "Submit Your Project And Win" contest!

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Runners-Up
This month, the runners-up are all family-related projects.  We weren’t intentionally going for a theme, but we’re happy with the way the chips fell.  Great job, guys!

Project: "Digital Slot Car Controller"

Creator:wrighthobbies
Average Score: 4.5
Prize: 10% Off discount on any order at Trossen Robotics!

Project: "Marble Maze"

Creator:mark625
Average Score: 4.2
Prize: 10% Off discount on any order at Trossen Robotics!

Project: "Anti-Boogieman Bug"

Creator:Droid Works
Average Score: 3.9
Prize: 10% Off discount on any order at Trossen Robotics!

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Third Place

Project: "Water Hobo"
Creator:tbh726
Average Score: 4.5
Prize: $50 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

Tim doesn’t like the neighborhood hooligans cutting through his side yard.  Obviously the only practical solution was to make a night vision equipped, motion tracking, automated water cannon to soak them if they set foot on his property.  That’s right, show ‘em who’s boss!  Since we’re a bunch of crotchety old men who spend a lot of time on our front porches shaking our fists and yelling "Get the heck off my lawn," we couldn’t help but love this project.

Second Place

Project: "USB-Q"
Creator:elcray
Average Score: 4.51
Prize: $100 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

If there’s one thing we like almost as much as playing with robots, it’s grillin up delicious meats.  "USB-Q" is a BBQ smoker automation system.  Anybody who’s ever spent a day operating one of these beasts will recognize how useful this project is, so practicality was a major factor here.  He wrote a cool VB.NET application for monitoring and controlling the temperature, and the system can be activated by a control box located by the grill.  A Phidget 8/8/8 board is used to read the inputs.  It also tracks the temperature over time, which is helpful for tweaking the PID algorithm for more accurate control.

First Place

Project: "White Lies"
Creator:iceclimb
Average Score: 4.65
Prize: $200 Trossen Robotics Gift Certificate!

"White Lies" is a piece of techno-art that responds to galvanic skin response (like a polygraph), so it behaves differently depending on who’s using it and can actually be affected by what’s going on in the user’s head at the time.  Kind of freaky huh?  It scored major points for creativity (I guess the judges were in an artsy mood this month).  We also liked the two videos, which did a great job of describing how the project came to be, what it’s purpose is, and how it works.  It involved some interesting construction and mechanical design, circuit design, microcontroller programming (Arduino), and it looks really cool!

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We want to thank everyone for their great submissions.  October’s contest is already rolling.  You can stay up to date on contest rules and regulations at theSubmit Your Project and Win contest page, and start posting your projects in our Project Showcase Forum.

"Droid Works" recently joined our forums, and he submitted this gem to our Project Showcase forum (which means he’s entered in this month’s Submit Your Project and WIN Contest!).

It’s a suped-up Parallax BOE-Bot designed to seek out dark places and illuminate them.  I’ll let him explain the project in his own words:

You’ll find a few more pictures of this critter (and its human master) in the forum thread:

http://forums.trossenrobotics.com/showthread.php?t=1139

If you’re interested in getting the BOE-Bot starter kit, click anywhere within this sentence.

To see the other Parallax products we carry, check out this blog post from last week.

We’ve been through a lot of sweat and blood here at Trossen Robotics, but nothing prepared us for a trial like this. Deciding on the winners of the Submit Your Project and WIN contest was a blast, but it wasn’t easy. Seriously, we wanted to give first prize to almost everyone who entered. We couldn’t though, so instead we employed our objective grading system; rating each entry on a scale of 0-5 in the categories of Wow-Factor, Ingenuity, Creativity & Documentation. Each TR employee graded the projects individually, then everything was totalled up and averaged. In the end, we had 3 prize winners, and 3 that were soo close to third place that we had to give them honorable mentions.

Without further ado, here they are:

First Prize: $100 Trossen Robotics gift certificate goes to…
Vaughn’sVirtual Crib home automation/security system
Average score: 4.34/5
Comments: Lots of in-depth work with both hardware and software, combining everything seamlessly into a very immersive project. You turned your house into a robot, dude. We like that.

Second Prize: $50 Trossen Robotics gift certificate goes to…
jonathanuwguy’sOfficebot
Average score: 4.25/5
Comments: It’s a flexible, feature-rich telepresence platform. Also, it has a nerf missile launcher. Fun stuff.

Third Prize: $25 Trossen Robotics gift certificate goes to…
JonHylands’Bioloid Gripper
Average score: 3.91/5
Comments: This one impressed us because it involved microcontroller programming, mechanical design and fabrication, integration with the Bioloid serial network, and it’s something we would be likely to sell if it were a commercial product.

Honorable Mentions (in no particular order)
bmouring’sLunar Rover Robot
streetpictures’Evil Babies
Brandon121233′Wall Avoiding Robot

Great work, guys. You three runners up will each receive a discount on your next order. We’ll email you the coupon codes shortly.

To everyone else: Thanks for participating! September’s contest is open for submissions, so go ahead and post more projects.

BIG NEWS HERE: For September’s contest, we’re doubling the prizes! That’s right; first place will get $200, $100 will go to second place, and third will get $50. That’s serious business, people!

This is a link to our Project Showcase forum.  Go there.  Brag about the cool stuff you’ve made.  Win fabulous prizes.

We’ve also updated the Submit Your Project and WIN Contest page, so please be sure to check it out.

Very similar to the post below this is a Hexabot we built for PDC in ‘05.

Features:
- Tethered PC control (code written in Visual Studio)
- Mechanics are Lynxmotion parts
- Motors are Hitec hobby servos (HS5645 & HS645)
- Controllers are Phidget USB 4 servo controllers
- 23″ long, 18″ wide
- 6 legs, 3 DOF each
- Input: Walking algorithms driven by computer program

I wrote a simple tri-gate walk for this crawler for the show. Later versions had different stances, turning gates, and a P&T camera head. This robot was another quick demo to show what can be built using common programming languages on a PC. Since this robot is tethered it can’t go far, but who really needs a crawling robot that runs around a forest? These are research or educational robots that won’t really leave the lab or classroom. Hexabot crawlers are a great way for teachers to create exciting challenges for students to work on. Everything is involved; mechanical design, creative problem solving, electronics, computer programming, physics, high level mathematics, team work, and more. I imagine a large obstacle course with the tether running to the middle. That would give about a 20 foot circular area to play in. plenty of room.

FSRs can also be added to the toes of these robots to give foot pressure sensory feedback.

Accelerometers or gyros can be used for tilt awareness.

PS: we have 3 hexabots, including this one, that have all been lightly used for shows that are up for sale if anyone wants them. They aren’t getting much use here lately and we would love to find them a good home. It’s a good way to pick up a lot of expensive hardware cheap. Just email us if you are interested.

Can you tell we are going through all our old video tapes lately? Here is a project we brought to PDC back in ‘05. This was another show that Coding4Fun invited us out to so we could show off the cool things you can do with Visual Studio Express.
Features of the arm:

- PC controlled (code written in Visual Studio)

- Mechanics are Lynxmotion parts

- Motors are Hitec hobby servos

- 15″ reach

- 4 DOF (we skipped the base rotation for the show because we are lazy)

- Input: logitech joypad being read from using DirectX

- gripper will hold angle via Inverse Kinematics (plotting X,Y of wrist joint)

Anyone who is a programmer in Visual Studio or Visual Studio Express can see how easy it is to start writing really cool code for these kinds of arms. The motor control is a cakewalk using the Phidgets Library. This is what we like about PC based robotics, it makes robotics intuitive for the millions of existing coders all over the world. It’s a natural horizontal move from writing regular computer programs to creating robotic programs.

If you want to discuss this arm you can visit the forum post about it here.

We posted some old projects in our forums. For us it’s like a trip down memory lane…

Laptop Controlled RC car robot platform

Read about the project here

The Trossen Robotics Humane Mouse Trap

Read about the project here

We just ran across this video on Youtube, check out this awesome home made Bioloid gripper by Jon Hylands using Bioloid parts and a Firgelli actuator. Nice job Jon!

We wanted to let everyone know about something new we discovered recently. While trying to figure out a simple way to keep batteries and hardware in place on our robots we wanted a solution that was simple and flexible. We didn’t want to have to build complex harnesses or framework because we weren’t sure of where the final placement of everything would be. Through trial and error we discovered the wonderfully elegant solution of using soft rubber sheets.

We cut sheets to our desired size and put them under our batteries and other components. These sheets are so sticky that the weight of the battery alone would seal it to the base plate so well we could tilt the bot almost perpendicular to the ground and the batteries would stay in place. In fact, after the batteries had sat for a few days you could lift the base off the ground by just holding onto the batteries. Without any straps! Delighted we knew we had found a handy way for securing hardware without drilling a zillion holes.

By adding Velcro straps you have a solution which keeps your hardware in place very securely, but without the permanence of bolts. It makes for quick adjustments and swap outs. Anyone who works with bots knows that it can be a pain to reach into tight corners to unscrew items that need adjusting or replacing.

Rubber Grip Sheets Link

Velcro Straps