Robots and Physical Computing

It is always a moment of excitement (perhaps I need to get a life) when the Adafruit Adabox arrives, this time is no exception with the arrival of the Adabox014. Inside there was a great mixture of things for making snow globes based around two devices TFT Gizmo and the Circuit Playground Bluefruit; this post is considered with an initial play with the Bluefruit. Bluefruit is a small Circuit playground with the addition of Bluetooth or more accurately Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). If you have played with the Playground express it is very similar. To experiment I wanted to play with the neopixels on the board through Circuit Python,  The starting point  https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-circuit-playground-bluefruit/overview  to get a bit of background and then to follow the links to how to get it all happening with Circuit. Task I wanted was to use it, using circuitpython on the Mu editor to control random colours cycling through all the neopixels and in r...

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...

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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 ...