Robot head

Let's Make Robots Robots
1

This is a head I originally designed to use on robots. It can shoot ping pong balls from the mouth and move his light eyes.

Although, I never used it in an other robot. Instead, I have it online on Livebots, a platform I'm creating for having interactive robots that people can play with through the internet. Go here and try it for yourself: http://livebots.cc/Robot/View/11

 

I wanted to make a cover for my Ping Pong Balls Cannon, so I started with a 5L water bottle:

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Covered it with kitchen paper soaked in white glue:

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 Added some paint and cut the eyes holes:

 

And finally added two halfs of a plastic ball as the eyes: 

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About the electronics, I used a motoruino which controls the mouth RGB LED, the motors and servo of the cannon and the eye's pan and tilt servos and white LEDs:

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Here you can see a colse-up of the eyes system:

The PVC parts files are available here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:32834

 

 Any comments or suggestions are always welcome! :D

Lets people control his eyes through the internet

  • Actuators / output devices: DC Motors, Servos, LEDs
  • Control method: Serial
  • CPU: Arduino
  • Power source: USB
  • Sensors / input devices: The Internet
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://community.robotshop.com/robots/show/robot-head
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cool :smiley:

Did you see it moving? I was controlling boh the eyes and that robot car. fun to play with. I even tried to ram your car… but that nifty bumper switches prevent it :D… and it backups. the only tiny little comment i have is that the car is steering in the opposite direction. otherwise you made it very nicely.

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I dont’t know if it was you,

I dont’t know if it was you, but I have been seeing it moving :slight_smile:

About the Farrusco, I guess you have to say it to guibot, cause I already told him that some days ago :stuck_out_tongue:

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This is a great project. I

This is a great project. I love it to play around with it.

I have one question, Do you think it is possible to make a bidirectional communication with the robot? I mean controlling the robot from the internet and get feedback of the robot sensors to display them.

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Thanks!

Yeah, I haven’t tought much about it, but I already know how to pass the information from the robot to the site. What I don’t know is how to display it. It could be just text or something more complex and cooler. I need ideas…

What do you suggest?

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That was just an idea, that

That was just an idea, that came into my mind.

At the moment I’m working on a robot project with a Raspberry Pi. The RasPi acts as Network controller and has a WebCam. The robot has an Atmel controller  and is serially connected to the RasPi. The robot software is already finished and I got the serial connection between RasPi and the robot up and running with Python.

Now I’m looking for the best way for the network connection, including video streaming. First I thought about programming a normal PC application with a Windows Forms UI to control the robot, visualize the sensor data and the video stream. After I saw guibots and your projects my next idea was:

Why not write a web server app for the RasPi and control / visualize the robot from a web browser. I read a lot about Web services, JSON, Javascript, JQuery UI, Flask etc, most of it totally new for me right now. But now I think this could work. Control over the Internet is not my primary goal, but nice to have if this will work too.

The UI should have sliders, buttons for control, progress bars and text fields for displays.

I think I will need to tinker around a little bit and will start a seperate thread if I found a solution/run into problems.

Thanks a lot so far.

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The idea at Livebots is to

The idea at Livebots is to keep it as open and universal as possible. The robots that we currently have there are using the service we created on the site, but they could be using anything else, as we allow any trusted member to use their own custom html. This means that instead of the buttons you could have an iframe of the controls page served by the Pi.

However I would like to integrate that kind of controls on the site, so that other people could also use them on their robots easily as we’ve done with the buttons. I think it would be cool to have like an UI editor, in which people could easily drag and drop the elements they wanted. Although I’m still a newbie on this as well, so I don’t know when I will be able to finish it :slight_smile:

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that is very cool!

the first picture kinda remidns me of furby :stuck_out_tongue:

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Count me in.

Hi Francisco, I’m just about to have a go at creating a web controlled mechanism using the Livebots info and the Instructable you posted.  (Won’t be ready be then end of April though.)

It may be worth updating the Instructable to say that you now have a Raspberry Pi distro to make the process easier.