movement panel for RoboSapien

Question

Hi, I a a nubie with Synthiam and have done much research and searching.  When I first run ARC it gives me several demo robots to load, one of which is the RoboSapien which I happen to have one.  I figure this would be a great starting project to learn the process however it seems much of the project has going the way of the dodo as when I click for the instructions I get 'page not found' and when I run the file I get an error "System Exception: Unknown control type 'RoboSapienMovementPanel'  Your ARC may be out of date or require upgrading or be corrupt"  I have downloaded the latest copy and this is a demo project is one the installer suggests. What am I missing?  This would be a perfect first step for me and I would like to make this work.  Any help is greatly appreciated.  J

DJ Sures · Accepted Answer

Hi there! The robosapien toy is not a supported product for ARC. The example project should be removed by our team to avoid future confusion. You can see the supported robot products and microcontrollers on the getting started guide link at the top of this website and, welcome to synthiam

robo rad · Answer

It is not truly supported but any robot with motors can be made to work using EZB controller to something like a newer 8 channel relay board and just apply the correct timing to the built in motors of something like a Robosapien, I have already tried this with the Robosapien Media bot that I have and was able to control the arms with EZB commands,not hard to do,could likely get some type of walking gait if I gave it more time.   It is just more work than you really want to do when there are other robot projects supported by EZB.

jmayes · Answer

Just so I can understand the underlying program flow of the project, I now understand the movement panel is a built in plug-in that part of ARC but I have also read that the RoboSapien was no longer supported with the V4 version of the EZB.  Is there actually code in the EZB to support the Serial/IR protocol of specific robots?  I thought the EZB was completely dumb and the PC does all the work.  I would like to know this to help me understand the total system. J

DJ Sures · Answer

For the ir communication, it requires microsecond timing and that was in the firmware of a controller. Extending the arduino ezb firmware protocol is probably your best bet to revive that movement panel. Check the getting started page for supported controllers, such as arduino  Not all movement panels are "built in". See the products page for controls that can be added. Anyone can make a skill control, and it can also be a movement panel. See the getting started menu option on the website.  the trouble with the woweee robosapien toy was it’s not a robot and can’t do much - so no one wanted to continue supporting it because it wasn’t interesting. With a hot glue gun, tissue box and a few servos, you can make a more capable robot with a camera that uses machine learning and speech recognition and other leading technologies... so that robosapien toy wasn’t as useful to the community

Jeremie · Answer

Hi @jmayes No, there isn't code on the EZ-Bv4 that sends the IR protocol to the Robosapien, you are correct the PC does the work. The Robosapien & Roboquad protocols were supported in the past but have been discontinued. As @Robo Rad suggested, there are other ways to control the Robosapien. You could use Relays or H-Bridges to control the motors, or you could take the electronics (and potentiometer) out of a servo and combine them with the motors on the Robosapien to make them much easier to control with the EZ-Bv4 (or IoTiny).

jmayes · Answer

Thank you for the quick answers!  I was not trying to continue with the robosapien as much as just understand the workflow of the project.  I fully understand the micro-second timing required for IR and why the V3 needed to have a driver in it, in the past I have fed a slave controller timing information for IR and let the slave do the work, since the master is providing all the timing info pretty much anything can be duplicated.  Can I assume this is the direction you went to in the V4?  This is great software, I just need to keep reading and get my feet wet with my first project!    Thankx again, J

DJ Sures · Answer

You got it - if you decide to learn by hacking the robosapien, there’s an arduino library for it that can be added to the arduino ezb firmware. I found it googling before, should be easy to merge the two into an ezb firmware

DJ Sures · Answer

Here’s a good code snippet on sending ir from arduino. That can be added to the ezb arduino firmware  https://playground.arduino.cc/Main/RoboSapienIR/

jmayes · Answer

Thankx again!  Jcool

jmayes

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