Grace’s First Robot

So we’ve had a lot of free time today as parts of the UK have been hit with heave snow, so no work for me and no school for Grace. So we had a play about with Bob the bot.

Unfortunately, even after showing her, she had a bit of a mishap and plugged in a battery the wrong way round which in turn damaged the EZ-B. She bought it round on Sunday and after doing some checks, the EZ-B was saying it was only receiving 5.3 volts from a fully charged 7.4v LiPo delivering 8.2v. Luclky I had a couple of spare version 1 v4’s, so did a replacement. As a knock on effect, the 18x RGB board we were using as eyes, got damaged too. So Bob underwent some surgery...

We removed the 18 RGB board and as I didn’t have a spare, we did a redesign and used a single RGB PCB I had and a small lens from a cheap smartphone zoom accessory. Grace wanted a cyclops look so it worked out well.

As the ARC project contains a lot of audio files, I thought I’d take the opertunity to do the EZ-B Sound breakout mod to improve the sound using a 3 volt amplified speaker which I hacked. Sounds much better now...

Grace started to paint Bob, but with the repairs she’ll have to do some touching up which she was happy to do.

So finally, for a bit of fun while learning, I showed her the basic concept of writing scripts. Chose not to use the auto positioner at this time as I wanted to show her writing scripts. The first dance routine video I did myself to surprise Hrave. The following video is what we came up with together. Enjoy.

It was one very happy little girl seeing the finished result of the dance routine, and having her robot working again. So after a bit of a hic up and me explaining that mistakes and trial and error are part of learning robotics, she’s learnt a valuable lesson and is looking forward to getting the paint brushes out again, and learning more to get her robot to do more cool stuff.

Right on! Nice work Steve and Grace!

steve can you adopt me . awesome boxbot steve&grace

@nomad.

I would, but you live too far away, lol

@Jeremie.

Thanks for the kind words. I’ll pass them on to Grace. After telling her about you being the robot engineer at EZ-Robot, she has become a big fan of yours and says that’s the sort of job I want to do, so she’ll appreciate your comments.

Grace and Steve (and Bob)

Great videos ! Fun to watch the learning process in action. Super job !

Your doing terrific Grace, Keep it up.

@Steve G that's great news! I would definitely encourage Grace to work toward a career in this industry. It's growing fast and we are going to need many passionate and creative people such as Grace to add their energy and ideas into the mix. This industry is both exciting and very rewarding. It's an amazing feeling to help create something from the idea stage, iterate it and and when it's complete deliver into a student/enthusiast's hands for their education, enrichment, and enjoyment. Working on a very talented team doesn't hurt either

Steve, Grace - Brilliant videos - you never know Grace may one day become a real Susan Calvin (i Robot) Roboticist!

Tony

Hi Tony. Really good to hear from you. I hope all is well with you. Thanks for you comments and glad you enjoyed the videos.