Robots and Physical Computing

Popular Posts Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour! The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , tha... Build your own Neuron in a Spreadsheet. Purpose:  To start to understand the basic idea behind how a Neural Network works by building the most basic unit a simple neuron using a sp... Dancing Kitronik's Game Zap - reacts to music You will glad to hear this is only a short post.   In an earlier post, Build a Disco Cube:bit that reacts to music ; the vibrations of music... Easy, Free and no markers Augmented Reality - location based AR For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  No... WebVR 5 Playtime: Augmented Reality to display Videos In previous posts ( post 1 , post 2 ) I have raved over the brilliant combination of Mozilla's AFrame and Jero...

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

You will glad to hear this is only a short post.   In an earlier post, Build a Disco Cube:bit that reacts to music ; the vibrations of music, makes the cube sitting on a speaker with the volume pushed to 11 (just to test it of course) react to the music. The accelerometers values in the micro:bit, in the three axis, are feedback to change the neopixels colour. Simple but good fun. With some very minor (and I do mean minor) changes it works on the Kitronik's Game Zap - eight pixels are altered at a time instead of five but apart from that nothing more. The code in python is shown below: from microbit import * import neopixel, random np = neopixel.NeoPixel(pin0, 64) while True:     for pxl in range (3,64, 8):         rd=int(abs(accelerometer.get_x())/20)         gr=int(abs(accelerometer.get_y())/20)         bl=int(abs(accelerometer.get_z())/20)         np[pxl] = (rd, gr, 0)   ...

Purpose:  To start to understand the basic idea behind how a Neural Network works by building the most basic unit a simple neuron using a spreadsheet. Objectives: - To see we can start building machine learning tools in commonly used software applications such as a spreadsheet without a lot of programming (though programming is good fun); - To see if we change a few values and it changes what the neuron does. What might be helpful to know before we start? Don't worry the video will mention these and show you them in action. In the press we see a lot of talk about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and one of these often mention is Deep Learning which is a form of something called a Neural Network. One way to think of a Neural Network is in our brains we lots of processing units called neurones, which are connected together to form a massive network of neurones, which is a neural network. What computer scientists have done is taken the idea and used it create an artificial...

Popular Posts Easy, Free and Quick Augmented Reality (AR) - AR.js Studio - Marker based For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  No... Easy, Free and no markers Augmented Reality - location based AR For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  No... PS3 Controller to move a USB Robot Arm Guest Blogger Hiren Mistry, Nuffield Research Placement Student working at the University of Northampton. How to use a PS3 Controller to... 10 most viewed post on Robots and Physical Computing: May 2020 Popular Posts Programming Robots Virtually 3: LEGO EV3 In this series of posts, I am going to look at experimenting with a few  tools that a... WebVR 5 Playtime: Augmented Reality to display Videos In previous posts ( post 1 , post 2 ) I have raved over the brilliant combination of Mozilla's AFrame...

For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  Now AR.js has just got easier - no coding need with the Beta version of  AR.js Studio   including using markers (see this previous post for more details) and the focus of this post, geo-located or markerless AR. It so easy I am going to show two examples. First going to the start screen of  AR.js Studio https://ar-js-org.github.io/studio , select location based project type. You will then be asked for the longitude and latitude on where you want your AR to be located, up to 10 locations can be used - I have only used one to trial it. If you don't know these co-ordinates they have included a link to a site  https://www.latlong.net/  (see below) that will give you these and you can then transfer them into AR.js Studio that is the geo location bit done. Now for the thing at the location. So for the first experimen...

For a few years, I have been a fan of Aframe and AR.js - these are fantastic tools for creating web-based Virtual and Augmented Reality.  Now AR.js has just got easier - no coding need with the Beta version of AR.js Studio https://ar-js-org.github.io/studio/ The start screen above gives you the option of location-based or Marker-based projects, I am selecting marker-based and then pressed Start building. I am going to use the premade marker but you can upload your own )there is a guide to what makes a good marker ). The premade marker you can download from the site using the download marker link underneath the marker. Apart from that, you don't have to do anything else to select the marker. Now you choose whether you want 3D object, image or video. So for this experiment, I going to use a free 3D model from  https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/duck-6e039c6c606c4c26a1359514352629fd  produced by likangning93 and released under a creative commons licence on Sketchfab . It i...