Robots and Physical Computing

Sphero have a track record of making well sort of fast spherical robots (along with a few Star Wars ones) in a recent kickstarter campaign they have a released a tracked robot   https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sphero/sphero-rvr-the-go-anywhere-do-anything-programmabl/description  - RVR and it is still fast and fun.   It does seem to be a step up, they are allowing more customisation with a expansion port and on-board power, aimed at connecting other pieces of hardware, for example, Microbit and Raspberry Pis.Even without these it is not short of sensors and lights  The simplest way to program it is still through the Sphero Edu App and its block programming providing a quick way to get going. This feels (to me) like a move towards the more 'traditional' robot hobbyists market - and that is fine. It comes almost completely built, so it is soon ready to go out of the box which is nice. I am interested to see what re...

This post is part of the materials for a session on Augmented Reality presenting at the 2019 SolSTICE eLearning and CLT Conference 5-6th June 2019 Edge Hill University  https://www.edgehill.ac.uk/solstice/files/2019/05/2019-Book-of-Abstracts.pdf    and the #MergedFutures Event on 14th June 2019. 1. Introduction                                                                                  So if we go to https://thimbleprojects.org/scottturneruon/692403 Using the markers above with this url running on your device (with a camera enabled) it should add tw...

The OhBot company has recently released a slightly different version to their OhBot - Picoh ( https://www.ohbot.co.uk/picoh.html ); a cute small robot head. This is a just a short post about some initial playing with the Picoh OhBot. Windows I started playing the windows based blocks (see below) programming used for programming the ohbot. Very scratch-like language but packed with lots of features. The program that loads automatically takes you through loads of the features . Python I wanted to know if I can use it with a Mac as well. The blocks are not available for a Mac but a Python-based approach is ( https://www.ohbot.co.uk/picoh-for-python.html ) . Set-up instructions are good, starting from the GitHub site  https://github.com/ohbot/picoh-python , the README file is useful including links to setting up for a Mac and links to example programs. Thonny is my prefered IDE for running Python in this case - just for the ease of use really. Mainly I have pla...

Popular Posts Moving Eyes with an Adafruit Adabox kit One of the things I enjoy is a subscription to Adabox from Adafruit, receiving the box and very soon before that finding out what the main ... How to produce a Microbit neural network This is really part two of a set of post  in response to a question from Carl Simmons ( @Activ8Thinking ) concerning building a   micro:bit ... Most read posts on Robots and Physical Computing blog in September 2019 Popular Posts starting with NVIDA jetson nano This is the third of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some of t... Lego Robot and Neural Networks An overview of using Lego RCX  robots for teaching neural networks present at workshop in 2011. Derby presentation from Scott Turne... Traffic lights - Microbit, GlowBugs and micropython In a previous post, I got a GlowBug to work with a micro:bit ( http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/2016/0...

Popular Posts starting with NVIDA jetson nano This is the third of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some of the current AI specific boards for Intenet of Things ... Coral Dev Board and Raspberry Pi This is the second of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some of the current AI specific add-on processors for Intenet of ... Moving Eyes with an Adafruit Adabox kit One of the things I enjoy is a subscription to Adabox from Adafruit, receiving the box and very soon before that finding out what the main ... Top 10 posts on the Robots and Physical Computing Blog in August 2019 Popular Posts Coral Accelerator on a Raspberry Pi This is the first of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some ... How to produce a Microbit neural network This is really part two of a set of post  in response to a question from Carl Simmons ( @Activ8Thinking ) concerning building a   micro:bit ... ...

One of the things I enjoy is a subscription to Adabox from Adafruit, receiving the box and very soon before that finding out what the main item is the box is a treat. The latest, at the time of writing, is AdaBox 13 with the MONSTER M4SK a set of small screens, based around  240x240 IPS TFT displays,  acting as moving eyes in a mask, along with a couple of masks, speaker, microphone, lenses, etc and craft materials for decorating a mask - a full list can be found here . My goal was, to play with this, was to create a slightly creepy mask where the eyes move - a simple build but fun to do. The Adafruit quick start guide for this (available here ) provides all the instructions on setting it and downloading the different sets of eyes (that is really creepy to write). A set of different graphics files are already available for different sets of eyes;  a couple of examples are shown below.  One suggestion is when you download the files for the eyes ...

This is the third of a planned occasional series of posts on playing with some of the current AI specific boards for Intenet of Things (IoT). In the series, it is planned that will be some experiments with the Google Coral accelerator adapter and the Development Board; as well the NVIDIA Jetson Nano.  In previous posts I started playing the Coral Accelerator adapter ki t and the Coral Development Board. This post looks a starting with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano Development Kit   which like the Coral Development Board is a small computer designed for running combined embedded and neural network applications. The processing power comes from  a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU and a 128-core integrated NVIDIA GPU (for more details see here ) So before we all get spooked; getting going is relatively easy, basically, follow  https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/learn/get-started-jetson-nano-devkit#intro . Following these instructions I would suggest if you are able to...