Category: News

News

Robot Overlord: uArm support grows

2016-09-09 Dan

uFactory sent us the STL files for their uArm robot yesterday, and I was able to integrate the correct look and feel in the afternoon.

Also improved the lighting and made sure WASD+mouse can fly if the cursor is over the picture part of the app. Much easier to fly around the world.

I already have firmware that runs the uArm connected to RO. I have a uArm on my desk waiting for a new shoulder servo and then I will be making a video of the two working together.

Maybe now developers will start to get on board. BCN3D MOVEO? 7Bot Duo? Send me a robot so I can integrate your machine. Please tweet them and ask if their machine supports #robotOverlord for me, OK?

The 2500th Makelangelo robot was turned on in the last couple of days in Muscat, Oman. I missed it because it came 10 days earlier than anticipated. My day is so full I had to hire an assistant and HIS day is full.

News

Electronics and Arduino class, September 11, 2016

2016-08-30 Dan

Join us for 2 hours of learning Arduino programming and making circuits with our Arduino Starter Kit. The goal of this class is to give you the minimum you need to feel comfortable exploring Arduino and making experiments on your own.

RSVP and get all the details below.

Electronics and Arduino programming 101

Sunday, Sep 11, 2016, 1:00 PM

Vancouver Hack Space
1715 Cook street Vancouver, BC

7 supervillains Went

Immediately following this course there will be an advanced course from 3-5pm for previous attendees.  Stick around for next-level goodness!BRING – Bring your own Laptop with the power supply. – For more learning time, please have Arduino software already installed. (http://arduino.cc/) – Eat first or bring a snack!COST We work form our Arduino S…

Check out this Meetup →

Stick around for our advanced class.  Previous attendees from our Arduino 101 class will go into deeper level magic.

Electronics 201

Sunday, Sep 11, 2016, 3:00 PM

Vancouver Hack Space
1715 cook street Vancouver, BC

5 supervillains Went

Advanced class for electronics and programming.This time: programming loops and conditions, sensors.

Check out this Meetup →

News

If you design a hit product in school…does the school own your intellectual property?

2016-08-26 Dan

The 2016 grade4-5 British Columbia ADST curriculum asks students to

  • use market research to identify a consumer need
  • build a product to satisfy the need
  • improve it and
  • market it

This list reads to me like “build a hardware business 101”.  How I wish I’d had that class in HS!  Glad to see this is required learning for young entrepreneurs.

…and yet…

I notice there’s something important missing.  There’s no mention of Intellectual Property (IP) or IP rights anywhere.   Picture this: a nine year old girl with a hit product. The next Super Awesome Sylvia, right? The next Limor Fried. She has a perpetual money machine and being a nine year old she’s got the cute factor to go viral. Only… only her classes didn’t include anything about Intellectual Property rights.  HungryWolfCompany has been watching for good ideas and sees SuperFried’s early blog posts about her project.  They quietly file a patent just different enough to not be prior art.  Eighteen months later when she takes it to KickStarter they sue her for violating HungryWolfCompany’s IP rights!

The first time this happens and HungryWolfCompany obtains the rights (as well as the product), the schools say to themselves: “Let’s protect the kids. Any student who invents a thing while attending our school automatically grants ownership of that thing to our school. We have the experience and the deep pockets to protect it. We’ll put it in the fine print when they sign up for the schools. It’s for the kids.”

In the USA, The Bayh-Dole Act[1] of 1980 gave intellectual property rights in federally funded inventions to universities. So in a sense, this has already begun.

News

Robot Overlord: Robot Scratch

2016-08-12 Dan

Since the last update

I’ve been fleshing out the undo/redo system.

I made every button and menu item into an Action, which encapsulates both the visible thing that is activated by the user and the behavior once it is activated. This way I can move Actions around the GUI to improve the layout with ease. Each Action issues a Command pattern, which forms the Undo/Redo stack. Actions also pass along their label name. So changing a position shows as “undo change position” instead of “undo change vector3f”. It obviously easier to understand.

Most Actions are variations of the same thing, so I made an ActionSelectFile, ActionSelectString, ActionSelectNumber, and ActionSelectVector3f. All robots are being updated to the new standard so that they look and behave uniformly. So… that’s nice.

What’s next: Robot Scratch

All that work was important and useful and Good… but also escapism. I’ve been dreading the next step for a while because it requires major skills and I’m not sure I’m up to the task. I get to the point: To program each robot in a human-friendly way I can see no better option than Scratch. Programming – as a discipline – sucks. I should know! I’ve been a programmer for 25 years. I’m 10 years past the average coder’s half-life.

Anything to make coding more intuitive and less error-prone is a good thing. The easiest thing to fix in programming is to remove syntax errors, which Scratch does with such grace… it’s poetic.

Critique my method

My theory is to make every robot run a RobotProgram which has a Events, Control, Sensing, Operators, and More blocks like Scratch. Move a robot to point X (which is an Entity in the world), wait for signal Y, send signal Z, Loop, Branch…. it a lot of work.Is there a faster way to get what I want?

Asked on Scratch forums, too.

https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/topic/213147/?page=1#post-2147190

So I’ve run this up the flag pole. Now to give it a day or three to see if anyone salutes while I work on my other prototypes.