kwatters's blog

I've been working on debugging various issues that people are having with the arduino service.  I've found that it's a bit overwhelming to read through so I took a crack at cleaning it up.  Below, I will share some notes about the coding convention that I've taken on with this refactor/code cleanup.

Design principals

If you're in the San Francisco / Bay Area, come visit us at the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo, CA.  We're very excited to show off 2 InMoovs and chat with people about MyRobotLab!

http://makerfaire.com/maker/entry/54951/

Hope to See you There!

So, in an effort to make the mega InMoov scripts easier to manage and to make sure the InMoov can better respond to human speech,  I've been working on making it so that the InMoovs can share their gestures  and also make it so that you can reload the gestures as they are edited without having to restart the whole bot.

So,  what does this mean and how does it work.

Frist, there is the InMoov service.  We have come to love this service, it controls all of the servos, camera, kinect, pir sensors, etc..

my local environment is a bit of a mess. but here's some java code that is sure to blow up and give you issues talking to an arduino runing mrlcomm v.29

String port = "COM31";
Arduino ard = (Arduino)Runtime.createAndStart("ard", "Arduino");
ard.connect(port);
for (int i = 0 ; i < 10000; i++) {
  ard.sendMsg(ArduinoMsgCodec.GET_VERSION);
}
System.out.println("Done..");

Here's a little teaser for the next great frontier.  I've been building a video game engine that can allow us to render 3d objects in a virtual universe using an open source java game library called "LWJGL".  There are some fantastic tutorials on YouTube for those who are interested in learning  https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRIWtICgwaX0u7Rf9zkZhLoLuZVfUksDP

Here's a video tutorial to create a JUnit test to validate that a service is working as expected.  It also shows some simple debugging to set a break point and to step through the code.

The below article is a work in progress, it talks a bit about InMoov and MRL at a higher level, but it does have some commentary about reworking the HS 805 BB  servo for continious operation and extracting the potentiometer.

We're making slow but sure progress with face recognition...

I've been re-wiring my InMoov(s) here with the Nervo board from Gael.  Here's a couple photos that are showing some of the progress.  I've been very happy with how easy they were to assemble, and the make the wiring much cleaner that what I had before.

Here's an update on my progress with the InMoov arm Inverse Kinematics.