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Yellow Drum Machine II

fritsl — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:42:13 +0200

Primary image

What does it do?

Gets funky with it's surroundings

Audiofile Engineering asked me to do a sequel to a robot of mine, Yellow Drum Machine.

It got the name Yellow Drum Machine II (YDM II).

I am going to ship it to the states now (I live in Denmark), so that it can be first prize in a world wide promotional contest from Audiofile Engineering

How to make / get your own Yellow Drum Machine

Pictures of the robot here

For more details of this project, I would like to start with this picture:

Is is taken from our house, looking up. To the left is a TV-areal. Please note how one stick is missing.. and how that left drumstick on YDMII is looking like something from a TV-antennae! I do not have much time for watching TV myself, but I told my wife that signal strength might possible increase if we took of that very one stick from there!

Also thanks to my wife for making the fine belt-track-pattern in black & yellow! (She did it while watching TV - and honestly nothing happened, picture is just as fine now as before)

To the right is my weather-stations wind meter. One might get the idea that the right drumstick on YDMII resembles that. Materials and inspiration can come from many places!

In most ways YDMII is the same as YDM, but for these differences:

A) The yellow "hat" instead of the huge speaker on YDM. I did not have more speakers like the one on YDM, so I spray-painted half a tennis-table ball and mounted it on top of a small speaker, that I mounted on top of the front part of a small flash-light.

This gives a perfect sound for the sample-playback!

B) YDMII has a tea-cup-speaker mounted on an old radio-antennae, the telescopic kind. By re-thinking (erh - in YDM, the original I did not plan or think much at all) .. by re-thinking ins- and outs to the standard picaxe 28 board used, I got some extra things to play with, and so I gave this fellow the possibility to twist the speaker that on YDM was placed in between the belt-tracks, bottom.

The videos:

Well - it is hard to do a number II; You have all seen a drumming robot now, and this one is even much like another robot of mine :)

I wanted the robot to play on a large fish's head. But I just could not find a fish with the right size head, that also had a good sound to it.

So what I ended up doing was just to carry the robot and a camera with me for about a week, shooting when/where ever.. And the last couple of evenings I have been editing little videos out of that material.

The programming / the code:

I ended up re-writing the "musical parts" of the core, and kept all the navigational from YDM.

I also created 3 extra "modes"; "Curious and playfull", "Tai Chi", and "Jam to musician". However, the basic code "Search and play" is now so expanded that there is no room in the tiny brains for anything more than that.

If you are the winner of the robot, you are very welcome to contact me, so I can advice you on how to enter the other "modes" by uploading other instructions to the robot, instructions I can send you :)

A nice detail IMHO is the on/off-switch:

It is two very powerfull (rear earth-material) magnets incapsulated in heat-schrinking plastic, with wires mounted on.

I tend to use this more and more over standard switches; It can be switched on/off by one hand.. and one can place a strip of plastic or paper between; Then it is a matter of pulling this out to turn on the robot.

It gives a better feeling; the robot is not something you just turn on or off; It wants to be on, but you can stop it by pulling the plug. Also this way you can attach a string to a door, attach the string to what's between the magnets.. and when you come home and open the door, you pull the string, and the robot greets you, and start it's business :D

I cannot remember where I got the pre-soldered magnets from, I bought a bunch.. But I will edit this as soon as I do :)

Congrationlations to the winner of this robot :)

I hope it makes you happy! I did my best to create and test it so it should be a good beat-maker for you in years to come :)

Get funky!

Cost to build

Embedded video

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Finished project

Complete

Number

Time to build

30 hours

Type

URL to more information

http://picasaweb.google.com/fritslyneborg/YDM...

Weight

250 grams

Icebox Robot (coolerbot?)

grog — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:28:27 +0200

Primary image

What does it do?

Roll around remotely & terrify co-workers

Unfortunately, this is the amount of documentation I have left of this project. It was a robot constructed from a thrown away icebox cooler. It ran windows 98 on a donated 75 mhz pentium. Since windows 98 was still dos at heart you could still use outb & inb functions. Now, I use Linux exclusively. It had wireless, so one day I left it at work and tele-operated it from my home. I used net-meeting to see where it was and a mic to scare co-workers into submission. bwah ha ha ha.

4 motors on the robot, steering, power, camera up/down, camera arm swivel. This only took 8 bits off the parallel port. If you look close you can see a wicked car speaker. It was like a PA system. I could hear, talk and see my terrified co-workers. Notice the black motor sticking up from the base behind the speaker. Its a cordless drill wired to the battery, controled by the parallel port.

Unfortunately, after all the electronics, motors and other crud was crammed in - there was no room for beer.

Cost to build

Embedded video

Finished project

Complete

Number

Time to build

Type

URL to more information

http://www.gizmogarden.com/index.php/Icebox_R...

Weight

3000 grams

Little Drum Machine

TheCowGod — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:36:15 +0200

Primary image

What does it do?

Drive around and find interesting things to drum on

Here's my latest project. I liked Frits' Yellow Drum Machine so much that I decided I wanted to build one of my own. I'm working on the physical construction first -- once I have somewhere to mount the batteries and logic board, I'll glue on some drumsticks and start working on the drumming code. When my SRF05 arrives in the mail, I'll add that and start working on navigation. The last step will be adding the sampling board to record and play back sounds. Well, that's the plan, anyway :)

Photos

My brother is a woodworker, which is nice to have access to :)

Look at that, dadoes and everything!

The robot's "superstructure," looking much nicer than the way I first planned to make it (Frits-style -- keep adding glue until it stops moving :). Batteries go in the bottom compartment, circuit boards in the upper one, and maybe a giant speaker glued to the top :)

Gluing it up...

The base so far

The underside

The breadboarded circuit. The blue board is a Pololu Micro Dual Serial Motor Controller for the main tank tread motors, and the three transistors will each switch one of the "drumstick" motors on or off. The green wire towards the top will be for output, maybe an LCD or a speaker.

One of the "drumsticks". I found that 1/4" aluminum tubing seemed to give a bit of a ring without being too heavy.

Sure, that's clear as day, right?

Main body glued together. It's a little taller than I had imagined, but ah well.

Rear view

2008/04/07

Reworked mounting of circuit boards to free up more space, and glued on the first drumstick motor.

2008/04/09

Now he's got a "bass drum".

Bass drum motor detail

2008/04/10

He can rock out now. Similar to what I assume Frits did, I hacked a little sampling circuit board, removing the pushbuttons and soldering wires to let the microcontroller trigger the playback and record functions. Now he can record his beats and play them back in a loop while he jams along with them.

Sampling circuit board detail

2008/04/13

My first PCB! A board for the SN754410 that lets me turn the sonar left and right.

The solder side. (I need a finer tip for my soldering iron)

Fabricated a bracket to mount the SRF05 onto the motor.

Rear view

He's now mostly complete. I want to add one more drumstick up front, but otherwise everything's there.

Once I'm happy with all the circuits, I'll probably solder it all up a PCB to eliminate that rat's nest.

Underside

2008/04/15

After gluing on the second front drumstick, I decided that the construction was complete, and I was reasonably sure that there wouldn't be major new components added anymore. So I decided to rebuild the circuit on a PCB "shield" that would fit right onto the Arduino rather than using a breadboard with dozens of loose jumper wires running between the two. To further clean things up, I cut up a ribbon cable from the same old 486 that donated its speaker to this project, and used that to connect my PCB to all of the sensors, motors, etc around the robot. The result is a much cleaner setup, and if I want to remove the Arduino for whatever reason, I can simply pull off the two ribbon connectors, rather than having to deal with tons and tons of wires and then later having to re-figure out which wires go into which I/O sockets. It took me quite a bit of thought to come up with a layout for all of the pins that grouped common functions together and made the circuit small enough to fit on that small PCB, and I'm actually pretty proud that I managed to fit it all in. What's even more amazing is that, after spending 6 hours soldering everything up, it actually all worked perfectly! I expected there to be tons of hard-to-track-down problems after doing so much soldering in such a small space.

One last shot of the circuit on the breadboard . I won't lie -- the real purpose of this shot was so that if I soldered up the circuit and it didn't work, I'd have some sort of documentation of what the original circuit looked like so I wouldn't have lost everything :)

That's a mess. Good riddance.

I didn't take any pictures of the soldering process, but here's the top side of the completed board. SO much cleaner. At the bottom is the 9-pin socket for the Pololu motor controller. Above that are the three transistors and diodes for the three "drumstick" motors. The screw terminals at the top are for the motor battery supply, and the pins on either side are for the two ribbon connectors. In the background, you can see the paper where I enumerated and grouped together all of the pins I needed to connect, in order to figure out what should be close to what, etc.

Bottom side of the PCB, where all the action is.

It slides right onto the Arduino, and mates with the Arduino's I/O sockets.

The paper where I laid out all my connections before soldering.

2008/04/17

With the construction done, I shifted my attention to improving the code. The coding I had done for playing drums worked pretty well for music that I hardcoded by hand, but as I started thinking ahead to how I wanted him to be able to 'write' his own drum beats, I realized that I'd need something a little more programmatical and less music-oriented. So I took a page from real drum machines, and I redid my drumming routines to get rid of the explicit calls to play notes of varying lengths. Now, instead, I just divide a measure into 8 beats, and my drum patterns are 4 measures long, so that's 32 beats per pattern. I have 4 "instruments" (bass drum, two drumsticks, and a click from the speaker), so a pattern can be represented by an array of four 32-bit long integers. When I want to play the pattern, I just loop over each bit in the integer, and play the drum if it's a 1, or don't play the drum if it's a 0. I had to do some fun bitwise math to look at individual bits from each integer, but it works, and now I just need to come up with four integers and I've got a new pattern.

I came up with some quick and dirty code to let him come up with his own patterns -- each time I measure left/center/right distance with the sonar, I stick each of those measurements into bass drum, snare, and hi-hat. It shows promise -- they actually sound pretty musical just like that. This whole 'coming up with his own patterns' thing will need some tweaking, to guide the patterns closer to musical and away from 'random banging', but it seems doable.

The part that I continue to have trouble with is the *&$king navigation. At first I thought I had found the problem when I realized that, since I had mounted my two drumsticks so far forward, my SRF05 was actually detecting those sticks most of the time when it looked left and right, so it was literally like he was wearing blinders. I cut the hot glue and re-glued the two motors angled farther back, so now that's not a problem anymore, but I still have trouble getting realistic numbers out of that sensor. Lots of times it will be like 8 inches away from a wall and pointing straight at it, and the sensor reports that the distances are something like (60 // 8 // 45) or (13 // 8 // 146) or things like that. The direction that is facing the wall head-on tends to work well, but the views to the sides seem to be completely unreliable. I added some debugging code to have it beep out the three distances through the speaker like the tracking devices in the movie Alien, with the pitch getting higher as the detected distance gets closer. That works really well for letting you know immediately how far away it thinks things are, at least relative to each other. And that has shown me that most of the time, it's getting totally incorrect numbers, which is why he can never manage to find anything to play drums on.

I know these sonar sensors have trouble when they're hitting a wall at an angle and things like that, so I'd expect little flaws every once in a while which wouldn't bother me, but this was pretty much just useless. Then I realized that one problem might be the fact that those little Solarbotics GM10 motors turn about 60 degrees in either direction, so his side views were actually getting close to looking completely sideways. That meant that, even if he's facing the wall head-on, the side views end up looking really far away, so the robot has to find himself really close to a wall before his side views can actually hit the wall:

So I glued small plastic tabs onto the motor, to limit the rotation of the head down to only about 40-45 degrees in either direction.

This seems to work MUCH better. I set him down on the ground, and he quickly lined up with the wall, drove up to it, and started drumming. Awesome. Now I can move on and continue working on improving the coding. So, some final shots of the completed robot:

The sampling board didn't have any holes in it for mounting with standoffs, so I borrowed more inspiration from Frits and just hot-glued it onto the side. And he's right, a strip of glue DOES work well to hold down the loose wires. How did I survive this long without a hot glue gun?

Ahh, I like that so much better than those loose wires everywhere.

I moved the microphone away from the bass drum motor, because it was picking up the whine of the motor louder than the drumming itself.

2008/04/19

I give up. The little plastic tabs I glued onto the sonar motor weren't working as well as I'd hoped, plus after just a few minutes of testing, they broke off and the motor went back to scanning its full 120-degree range. I just couldn't get the robot to find things worth playing on -- he spent all his time wandering around, snaking back and forth, never actually reaching any walls. It was especially frustrating since my 'object following' code for Harry The Discbot works so well. Harry, of course, has his "eyes" on a real servo, not a GM10 motor. So I gave up trying to get it to work with the GM10. I can certainly appreciate the pleasure of building complex things with really simple tools, but I just wasn't making progress and it wasn't being fun anymore. So a few minutes with an X-acto knife, and the GM10 is outta there. I first glued on the Hitec HS-55 micro servo that I'd bought on a whim to use on a later project. Once I started testing it though, I was surprised by how slow it was. I had just kind of assumed that, since it was such a tiny servo, it'd be really fast, but apparently it's geared down to be closer to the speed of a full-size servo. It worked just fine for locating objects, but I really wanted to try to preserve as much of the "zip" of the GM10 as possible. It probably doesn't help that the HS-55 is Hitec's "economy" model. When I looked up the specs, I found that sure enough, the speed of the HS-55 at 4.8v is 0.17 sec/60 degrees, whereas most of their nicer servos, just a few dollars more, are in the 0.12-0.14 range (and even down to 0.9-0.10 still at reasonable prices). There are $80 servos that do it in 0.04, but that's not what I'm looking for.

So I bought an HS-81, which is rated at 0.11 sec at 4.8v, brought it home, and tested it, and was much happier with the speed. It's still no GM10, but I'll happily trade a little bit of zip for actually being able to find the damn wall. So I broke out my X-acto knife AGAIN (I've gotten good at removing hot glue), removed the HS-55 and glued down the HS-81, and now we're in business. I ported over my object-following code from the Basic Stamp-powered Harry to the Arduino, spent some time adapting it to this purpose, and at last! He can actually reliably find things to drum on. Ahh.

With the GM10 gone, I no longer needed the motor driver PCB I spent so much time and thought making, so off that comes from the side of the robot. Ah well, I'm sure I'll find use for it in another project.

I've also made some more progress on his 'writing drum patterns' subroutine, so it sounds a lot more like music. I've posted a new video above showcasing his new talents. There's still work to be done, of course -- there's a slight gap between patterns for some reason, and I've got plenty of ideas for improvements to the code. But now he's finally starting to behave like a proper drum machine :) Now I'm having fun again. And I hope Frits isn't too disappointed that I gave up on the GM10 -- I'm impressed as hell that he managed to make his work so well with one. I guess I'm just not as skilled a roboticist as him :)

I'll keep updating this as I continue working.

Cost to build

$150

Embedded video

Finished project

Number

Time to build

20 hours

Type

tracks

URL to more information

http://binrock.net/photos/?rid=896

Weight

Yellow Drum Machine

fritsl — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:16:12 +0100

Primary image

What does it do?

Audiofile Engineering asked me to make a robot like this for them, to be won in a promotional contest. Yellow Drum Machine II is done now, and it can be found here.

How to make / get your own Yellow Drum Machine

If the google-videos of this robot is down, here is an excact copy, take that, Google :)

.. There is always more fun to do with this robot, but for now I will just mark it "complete" in the current version, hope you enjoy it.

Notice how the robot first plays on the object it finds (or is forced to find by the angry cameraman), plays a small beat, and records the beat it plays on it. Then this recorded beat is played again, and it starts to play on the object (an belt tracks and everything else it has),and also playing this sampled beat :)

Also some videos from construction and tuning-time..

What it does? Basically:

Navigate around, collect some data, avoid obstacles, until it
Finds something "worth playing on" (a single isolated object or a wide flat surface that it can find an angle onto)
Snakes into place
Plays some beats on what it have found, and samples this, checking it has a "good sound"
Based on data collected in the area, and sample just made, then compose a little rhythm, and plays this along with the sample

Why? Well.. I was sitting thinking what I should do for my next robot, what it should do.. Listening to music.. making a rythm with some robot-parts.. Thought; "Hey, I will make a robot that drives around and plays on stuff"

It is just made with sticks mounted very fast with a melt glue gun. But it is really solid still.

Under neath is speaker and a microphone.

The speaker is used for beeps from the microcontroller, and to make click-sounds to the beat. The click-sounds are simply made by setting a pin high and then low straight after each oter. This way I can have the Microcontroller make sound to the music it is also playing, without using any time / causing delay.

The microphone (located on the stick between the two motors) is used to sample sounds and take input, measuring if the sticks are hitting anything or not.

Also it can be used to detect a foot stumping on the floor or someone clapping, and so the robot can find the speed of this after four beats, and play along / fall in to your clapping or stumping.

And.. It can be used when there are kids playing with the robot; Signals "Record", the kids shout, and the robot then plays music / a beat with their shouting as a part of "the music" :)

This robot is made interely without servos. The drumsticks (The "Bass Drum" on the picture) are just these litle geared motors that I am quite fond of.

At the top there is another speaker. It is quite too large, I know, but I thought it looked cool :D Also because it is so torn and twisted, as I could not get it out of it´s old cabinet. On the top-speaker there is a red LED. It lights when the robot is recording, and gives a small blink when it is playing back a sample.

As said above, there is no servo on this robot. The head is also using the little motors from solarbotics. It was, however necessary to use some very thin wire to connect the SRF05, as it otherwise would sort of jam the head now and then if I was using my standard blue wire.

It was quite a fun challenge to make the rather complicated navigation and not having a servo, but only left /right/front to place the head, and then do the rest with the body.

The navigation is complicated because it is not just a matter of navigating around obstacles - that was the easy part. Second the robot has to find good places to drum; A single, isolated object, or a flat wall. Then the robot has to place itself on a good angle to the wall, or straight infront of the object.. All with only L/R/F with the head ;) But it does it quite well now! I am usually amazed of what it finds to play on, when I just let it drive around.

The robot runs for ever on just 4 cells. It must be because the belt-tracks are so geared that there is no strain on the motors.. And no servos, and the sampler takes nothing either.. I dont know, I just know that it runs for hours, more than my wife can stand to listen to - on one charge :D

In the center of this image is a L293D Motor driver. It is just used to enable the head to turn both ways.

Notice how easy it is to mount stuff with this glue; I just thought it would look good there on the side. Put some glue on, and stick it there. Hey, the cables are dangling.. Well.. press then onto the wood, and add a line of glue, bingo!

There is a blue print sticking out behind the wood from a cheese-container ;) That is "the sampler". It is actually this

- And it is just hacked; I took off the switches, and now the microcontroller can record and playback sounds.

- As almost always; Picaxe 28X1 mounted on a standard board. So fast, so effective!!

I think the biggest advantege with building fast as I do (instead of measuring and drawing) - is that you get cooler designs! Lot more soul in this one, than a robot I would make if I was to draw it first..

I know nothing is straight or even or level etc.. But who gives? It is made to play the drums, not to have straight lines :) And trust me; it IS actually quite solid. I will not try, but I am sure it could withstand to be dropped from a table without any harm done.. And if not, it is REALLY fast to fix it again!

Basic construction-materials..

Thanks for listening!

Any questions? If not, then let´s get funky :D

Cost to build

$120

Embedded video

Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.

Finished project

Complete

Number

Time to build

20 hours

Type

tracks