News Archives - November, 2009

A little while ago we received an email from an observant Mr. Pavel Ryabinkov, the site-admin of www.myROBOT.ru, who was asking us to relay a question to Mark Tilden:

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Could you answer, can it be considered the official date of birth BEAM-robotics November 10, 1989?I was basing this question on the message Brian O. Bush:
“The first BEAM bot was “Solaroller 1.0″.  It was invented Nov 10, 1989 in Waterloo, Ontario at the University of Waterloo MFCF Hardware Lab (after hours) by Mark W. Tilden. It was made from two dead calculators, two dead Phillips cassette mechanisms, and several parts from Laser-printer cartridges”.
http://faq.solarbotics.net/oscillate.htmlI would also ask whether the celebrated 20th anniversary of BEAM-robotics, which will be held November 10, 2009. I would appreciate your attention to this matter.

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To which, Mr. Tilden replies: Hi Pavel.
Why, yes it will be the twentieth anniversary of BEAM next Tuesday, Nov 10, 09. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. So busy at the moment it would have completely slipped by. Here’s a little more background if you wish to post it somewhere.The first BEAM robot was Solarover 1.0, built after I attended an Oct 29, 1989 lecture by Rod Brooks at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Brooks laid out his then-fashionable “Subsumption architecture” design for robot control that, although simpler than conventional AI, was still strongly computationally based. I remember impertinently asking “if simpler works, then how low could one go?”. Dr. Brooks answered that he was certain more complexity was needed for machine competence than not. I had evidence otherwise, but didn’t press the point.Fortune favoring the ready mind, that lecture just catalyzed concepts, skills, and designs I’d considered for many years. Are there minimal, elegant, efficient, low cost solutions to autonomous robot control? How long would it take to proctor real-world autonomous robots from “single cell” organisms to human form competence using guided design? In the months that followed, the tenements of “Biomorphic design” (the science behind the educational BEAM outreach) came about in a flurry of bot building, IEEE lectures, Usenet posts, and late-night contemplations.

An innate coffee addiction also helped significantly, blessings be to the bean.Solarover 1.0 came about as an experiment to see just how inexpensively one could build a light-powered. light seeking autonomous rover from junk parts, and “trick” it to do simple floor cleaning as a result of its Braitenberg-inspired wanderings.

The first of many, I went on to build dozens of similar robots based on the primitive Solarengine neurons that year, which led to the BEAM International Robot games, international lectures, the 1992 Santa Fe Artificial Life conference (lecturing alongside Brooks), publications, books, TV, kits, Solarbotics, Los Alamos National Laboratory research, NASA, and a broad line of WowWee robots which have sold around 20 million units to date (not forgetting the thousands of hand-built robots by colleagues, enthusiasts, and steampunks internationally).

This Christmas will see the presentation of the fast and funny Joebot humanoid on toy shelves worldwide. Walks, talks, sees, listens, all for less than the cost of a single Asimo-class Superservo. The Joebot prototype was entirely BEAM controlled before the behaviors were sampled into processor waves for mass manufacture: the Biomorphic Nervous network comprising less than 80 transistors in a symmetric, self-organizing array of custom-made printed circuit boards.

Best of all I have answers my research questions from what seems a lifetime ago.

A handful of transistors (with the added support of good friends and colleagues) are all you need.

Yes Virginia, there are beautiful, elegant solutions to making things move.

Twenty years.

Some compulsion required.

Sincerely,

Mark W. Tilden
Robotics Physicist
Nov 5, 2009

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Inexcusably, I was very involved in getting ready for the STAO.org teacher’s conference, and simply didn’t get everything ready in time. That was a mistake, as it is BEAM that made us (funny that, as we usually are the ones who make BEAM). Still, here we are, a humble 20 years later after Mark’s first design into building something simple, cool, and geeky.Let’s celebrate! We’ve brought out the popular Junkbots and solar cell bundles. Not only that, but they and other popular Solarbotics kits and parts bundles are 15%-35% off until the end of the month!

• SolarSpeeder - 15% off
• PumLantern - 15% off
• Solar Engine Kit - 20% off
• MSE Solar Engine Kit - 20% off
• Ultimate Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels Deal - 20% off
• Solar Cell Bundle - Small - 25% off
• Solar Cell Bundle - Large - 25% off
• Scout Walker III - 35% off

A tip of the hat to Mr. Tilden - thanks for sharing your technology with the rest of the world. It’s been a fun ride!

Ohhh, we like 3D printers. We’re working with the local Protospace to fund-raise for a Makerbot. I want to see one of these Line Follower chassis (especially as some of the parts look particularly familiar!).

LOVE open source hardware!

We love SparkFun. Great group of people. Excellent products. It’s just that they’re… well… twisted and cruel.

You see their RoboJoust event? We didn’t take them serious when they said it was to be performed 4′ off a concrete floor. But here’s the proof. They’re actually building the table that high off the ground.

Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting a minimum construction material content of 60% lego blocks. And “flame-retardant construction materials”…

(Looks like fun. Wish we could come play too!)

We’re working on some new Arduino projects. It’s fun working on open-source hardware. Both these projects are out for manufacture now, so hopefully it will only be a few weeks until they are ready.

Project One: The GVS Shield

We love Phidgets. They have all kinds of useful sensors, to which most subscribe to a handy pinout “Ground / Vcc / Signal”, which also describes most servo interfaces. It’s turning into the general standard for most dedicated interfaces. So, to make use of these with an Arduino, we’ve put together our own GVS Shield.

We could have made it with a simple 3-row x  18 block of male pins, but that wouldn’t fit the locking buckle-type connectors found on many Phidget and other accessory items. We’re using nicely space, proper shielded pin plugs. Here are some design highlights:

• D1, D2, Gnd pin connector for serial I/O
• D2-D12 right-facing plugs
• A0-A5 left-facing connection buckled plugs
• Three 0.1µF decoupling capacitors
• One 330µF electrolytic surge capacitor
• “BlinkM” compatible I2C plug (shared with A4/A5 plugs)
• Pin 13 LED & Reset brought up from main board

Project 2: The Ardweeny!

Yes, the name was a challenge. They didn’t think I’d have the guts to follow through with the name, but it’s just so suitable.

This project is inspired by Kimio Kosaka’s One Chip Arduino project, where he jams all the parts for an Arduino on top of the IC, and just plugs the IC into the breadboard directly.

This is an Arduino PCB designed reverse to most others. Instead of mounting the IC to the board, we’re mounting the board to the IC (let me clarify…).

Put all the stuff on the top. Install looong leads through the rows on the outside edge. Jamb your ATMega328 in from the underside so the chip leads are pointing down, in the same direction os the long leads. Tack solder the chip leads to the long leads. Or not, if you think friction fit works.

Depending how you soldered the ATmega to the pins, you can either make it fit a 0.3″ space header (where it straddles the breadboard centerline perfectly) or 0.4″ wide (where it straddles the breadboard centerline, but uses up 1 extra empty hole next to the centerline).

Besides needing an FTDI cable, or SparkFun-like USB adapter/programmer, this will be a very inexpensive and compact way to do Arduino development. Stay tuned!

Our clear breadboard was recently blogged on Makezine, which reminded me we juuuust about had an instructable ready for that same item. So, a few hours later, it is finished and posted.

And while I was at it, I finished editing another Instructable by Jerome Demers, our intern. He did up a DIY Miniball instructable that’s based on our retired Miniball kit.

Back to it - lots to catch up on that isn’t near as much fun as writing new Instructables!

Hey everyone! The first week of November has already slid by, and that puts us coming up to Remembrance Day, or Veteran’s Day for our pals in the US. We’ll be closed on Wednesday, November 11th to observe the event. We will resume the processing/shipping of orders and responding to any correspondence we’ve received when we open on Thursday.

On a different note, although the first day of winter is technically on December 21st, we can’t be fooled. Chilled winds, diminishing hours of sunlight and snow drifts are waiting pounce at any moment. So to celebrate this wonderful time of year, we’ve dusted off the ol’ Winter Theme for our PumLantern. Just like last year, this one will only be around for a little while before it disappears again, so you better get it quick! Already have the PumLantern? No problem - you can get the PumLantern Addon right here.

Good news, good news! We’ve been following the Oomlout system of learning Arduino since last February, and we’ve finally finished putting together our own Solarbotics Edition of the open-source ARDX Arduino Experimenter’s Kit.

Besides just working with the fine folks at Oomlout to make sure our edition meets their high standards, we’ve also been contributing our own efforts to the documentation sideof the project. Open-source collaboration works!

So what’s different about the Solarbotics edition of the ARDX?

• 12 colour breadboard template overlay sheets. These make it particularly easy to accurately mount your parts to the breadboard.
• The 5-cell AA battery pack holder. 7.5V means the 5V power regulator on your Arduino / Freeduino-SB will run perfectly with no fear of a voltage sag.
• Large 11 x 7″ plastic case has plenty of space for your whole experimenter’s package - even the manual!
• Larger-than-normal 10 x 6×3/8″ 32 page manual is easier to read than a folded 8.5×5.5″ half-sheet manual

The rest of the kit contains a veritable plethoria (”lots of neat things”), including:

• Arduino Duemilanove with ATmega328
• 300 point breadboard
• Laser cut color acrylic base-plate
• 1 USB A-B cable
• 70-piece flexible jumper wire bundle (these are nice)
• 10 x Red 5mm LEDs
• 11 x Green 5mm LEDs
• 1 x massive 10mm blue LED
• 1 x DC Motor
• 1 x Mini Servo
• 1 x 74HC595 8-bit shift register IC
• 1 x Piezo Speaker/sensor element
• 2 x Pushbuttons
• 1 x 10k Trimpot with handy finger-sized knob
• 1 x Photo resistor
• 1 x TMP36 Temperature sensor
• 1 x 5V DPDT relay
• 2 x 2n2222 transistors
• 25 x 560 ohm resistors
• 3 x 2.2k resistors
• 3 x 10k resistors
• 2 x 1N4001 diodes
• Arduino-to-acrylic base mounting hardware
• 4 x 2-pin male headers (for pinning the templates to the breadboard)
• 1 x 20-pin male headers (for pinning more templates to other breadboards)