NYC Weekend

At the end of September Audrey and I travelled to New York City.

The trip was scheduled around our annual visit to Maker Faire, a festival of "making" (hobby electronics, robotics and technology wackiness).

A month or so before I had read a glowing review of the special Picasso sculpture exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. So we travelled down Saturday morning to visit MoMA. That was well worth it: I thought the exhibit was fantastic. We always think of Picasso as a painter, but the journey he took through sculptural media is fascinating. It also makes it even more obvious what a genius he was.

I apparently didn't take any photos, but we spent Saturday night with friend Brady and Julie and Julie's brother in Yonkers. We arrived for a lovely dinner and had a great visit.

At Maker Faire we met up with another good, old Seattle friend: Bill. He was there with his wife and three kids. Audrey had fun with Cole and Tatum at a station where they could disassemble electronic devices. Audrey was fascinated.

That reminds me that I need to collect some electronic junk for the girls to take apart!

One of our favorite things about Maker Faire is the gyro booth that is there every year. It did not disappoint.

Oh, and Audrey always loves to climb on the big spider-web-like thing in the Hall of Science playground.

Maker Faire 2012

Maker Faire 2012

For the third year in a row Audrey and I traveled to New York for World Maker Faire. Maker Faire celebrates "maker" culture: people who like to learn their own technical, mechanical and electronic skills and bend technology to do things it wasn't designed to do. I like to bring the girls (Charlotte and Carol went last year but Charlotte chose not to this year) so they can see that they can make anything they want if they put their minds to it.

Audrey enjoyed the day very much. She loved all the cool and creative things to see and do, but her favorite part of Maker Faire is the gyro stand.

This year we drove down and back on the same day to save hotel costs and to have all of Sunday back home for projects. When we left Maker Faire at about 6:30 we discovered we had a flat tire. Audrey had the opportunity to see how to change a tire, but the 50 miles per hour maximum speed rating on the spare wasn't going to serve us too well for the 200 mile drive home. In an excellent use case for smart phones I was able to find a Sears auto center not too far away and they agreed to stay open late to help us. They were incredibly efficient and kind and they wouldn't even accept a tip for staying late. 20 minutes after we arrived Audrey and I were heading to the freeway for the drive home. That was the cherry on top of a great day.

Homework-o-bot

Audrey brought home some school work she did around "inventions". Her invention is a Homework-o-bot that contains both a Math-o-maniac and a Math-o-matic. Can you tell which subject's homework gives her the biggest challenge?

My dastardly plan is working - my geekdad activities are rubbing off on Audrey!

Click on the image for a larger version.

Two-Legged Robot Walker

The Christmas list I gave to Carol contained mostly electronics hobby stuff, including a couple of servos and a Lynxmotion SSC-32 serial servo controller. The servo controller allows one to exercise complex control over multiple servos (32 of them with this board) via simple commands sent over a serial port.

So I had three available servos, a servo controller and an Arduino and I wanted to build a walking robot. Hmmm. I'd need to use one servo for each of the two legs but then I need a way to vary the traction of the legs so one can move forward on a return stroke while the other moves backwards on the power stroke. A moving weight should do it!

I didn't have any small hardware for attaching servos to stuff on hand. Nor did I have any good materials for the chassis. So I made the chassis out of cardboard in which I cut holes for the servos and I used thin steel craft wire to tie the servos in. I also used the wire to strap pencils to the servo horns as legs and as a boom to hold the swinging weight. Add a couple of rubber bands to hold the chassis in the desired shape and the electronics and batteries in place and viola: a humorous hack of a robot!

After a few minutes spent programming the Arduino to send the desired commands to the servo controller, it walked! Sort of.

It may not be pretty, but it's the first robot I've built completely from scratch.

Click the image to see the video.

December

December

It's been a busy month.

On the first weekend of the month Audrey attended a LEGO robotics event at Tufts University's Center for Engineering Outreach and Education (CEEO). She had a blast learning how to assemble and program a simple robot. Just before Thanksgiving I volunteered in the fifth grade at Audrey's school using the same LEGO robotics kit. I liked it so much I bought one on eBay. I still need to get a copy of the CEEO software (Robolab) so Audrey can use the same tool she used at the camp. Audrey and I had a nice lunch date before the camp at a diner near Tufts.

The next day we went skating. We'd like to go a lot this winter. The rinks got a late start due to the second warmest November on record but they're now in full swing. We hope to skate at Frog Pond on the Boston Common during the break this week.

Later that week we went to Zoolights at the Stone Zoo a mile from our house. We drive by all the time but this is the first time we've been. It was cool to see our little zoo all lit up for the holidays.

The next weekend we had a very busy Saturday. We had a lot to do since I was leaving the next day for China. We started the day by getting our Christmas tree. We go to the Melrose High School where the band sells trees as a fundraiser. Then Audrey had figure skating class. We squeezed in some tree decorating and then we were off to the Polar Express, the local Christmas Train. After that we went to the neighborhood holiday party across the street.

On the morning of the 11th I departed for Hong Kong. This was the first time since having kids that I had been away for more than a night or two and we knew we'd miss each other. Fortunately I had decent internet access everywhere on my trip and we were able to have video chats once or twice a day the whole time I was gone. That made a huge difference.

The day before my return Charlotte had neighbor Anna for a sleepover. It was the first sleepover for any of our kids. All the kids did great and it was a success.

I returned on the 18th. I had a super tailwind on the return flight so I made an earlier connection in Toronto and got home four hours early. That was a treat. Both girls ran to me in the airport and jumped into my arms. Then we went out to dinner to celebrate.

Resources for Geeky Moms and Dads

A coworker who knows about my geeky parent pursuits asked me to send him some links to get him started. I'm recording what I told him here for posterity. When people ask me in the future I can direct them to this post.

My favorite resource is Make magazine. Is it the most visible publication in the growing "maker" community and always contains great projects of all kinds. Most of the projects are documented online at http://makeprojects.com/.

Another excellent resource is the Geek Dad blog from Wired. The signal to noise ration can be a little low if, like me, you aren't interested in dungeons and dragons or comic books. But there are still many gems per week for the rest of us. The editor, Ken Denmead, has also published several "Geek Dad" books containing projects to do with kids.

LEGO has made two different robotics kits. The first generation Mindstorms kit is not made any more. It was LEGO model 9719 – if search for "LEGO 5719" on eBay you can always find a few kits for sale. I bought one in pretty good condition with all the pieces for $125. The second generation is called LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 and can be bought at many places. Amazon sells it for about $230 (it's "lego 8547").

Mindstorms (LEGO 9719)

Mindstorms NXT (LEGO 8547)

The first generation is compatible with traditional LEGO bricks. The second generation is somewhat compatible with traditional LEGO bricks, but the pieces that come with it are LEGO Technic. The first generation is slightly easier to program, but even the second generation is pretty easy once you get used to it. Both have visual programming environments.

My 7-year-old daughter just attended a LEGO "camp" for three hours at Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO). If you live in the Boston area you can visit that site and sign up for an email list of events. CEEO runs week-long LEGO robotics camps in the summer even for kids as young as 1st grade. They also have classes for adults.

If you want to take a more DIY approach to learning about electronics and robotics, O'Reilly and Make publish several books that can get you started. They have beginner electronics books and books like "Making Things Move" and "Making Things Talk" (meaning make devices communicate with each other). I've read the former and loved it.

Arduino Uno

Finally, anyone getting into electronics and controlling things should also learn about the Arduino "project". Arduino is an open-source hardware platform that incorporates a fairly powerful microcontroller with circuitry, firmware and programming environment on a standard layout, making it very easy for beginners to start controlling things. You can buy all kinds of fascinating Arduino-compatible stuff at places like Maker Shed and Sparkfun.com. There have been three generations of Arduino so far, if you buy one now you want an Arduino Uno.

Mister Bones

Click to go to video

"Mr. Bones" is a plastic skeleton my mom gave the girls a long time ago. We like to dance with him, dress him up and put him in weird poses. His arms often fall off.

For the past month I've been thinking about using Mr. Bones in a porch display for Halloween. This morning I woke up designing it so I surrendered and just built the damn thing. I used an Arduino to control LEDs for the eyes and heart. The biggest challenge was designing code to generate independent waveforms in a single loop (for the geeks out there, I ended up doing it by populating two lookup tables and the main loop just steps through them in parallel). I assembled the soundtrack from free sound effects found on the web and edited them together in Garage Band; it will play on an iPod with speakers.

This is the first time I've built an "animatronic" Halloween display. I think they're just going to have to get better every year, now. Next year's will include motion.

Bristlebots

I get a lot of ideas from the Geekdad blog. They recently ran a mention of a project from Evil Mad Scientist Labs called Bristlebots. It's dead simple: get some pager vibrators (tiny motors with unbalanced weights on their shafts that cost about a buck each) and fasten one with a battery to a toothbrush head.

It just so happens that the girls went to the dentist yesterday and got new toothbrushes. So today I repurposed their old brushes.

If you build them, be aware that the leads on the pager vibrators are very fragile. I broke three of them. In particular they can't take any strain when you're bending the attached wired around. Isolate them from that strain with your finger grip.

Click on the image to go to the video.

Science Day/Maker Faire

Science Day/Maker Faire

This past weekend was a STEM weekend.

Saturday morning we attended the Family Science Day at my office. It's an annual event presented by the Merck Institute for Science Education and volunteers from among my coworkers.The girls really enjoyed it. When we arrived there were a bunch of walk-around stations where kids could experiment with different scientific facts. Then a representative from Mass Audubon gave an auditorium presentation with a live kestrel and a barred owl. That was followed by an interactive session where we learned a lot about sponges and also about making observations and performing experiments. Then we had pizza.

That was the warm-up for our weekend. After the science fair we hopped in the car and drove to New York to attend Maker Faire on Sunday. This was the second annual fair held in New York; there have been fairs for several years in the Bay Area. Last year Audrey and I attended the inaugural NYC fair.

Boy, where to start on what we saw and did there?

• In the center of the grounds was a huge metal fire-breathing dinosaur/lizard machine - and they were letting kids climb on it! Audrey climbed up onto a sofa built into the rump, but then she decided that was a little too high for her. Charlotte sat in the driver's seat. Audrey also waited for a while to climb up into the belly of the beast. At one point the builder of the thing told one kid not to climb on a particular part because "it's dangerous." All of the parents looked at each other and said to each other, "The whole thing is dangerous!" But that's part of the point of Maker Faire: don't just passively consume stuff - take risks and explore! Like this. I loved the skin on the lizard that was made from old truck tires cut into long strips.
• The Life Size Mousetrap, of course. See last year's video to see it in action.
• The girls always love the Science Playground at the New York Hall of Science, the site where Maker Faire is held.
• Played with Oobleck. We were really looking forward to the big vat of it that they had last year, but even without the big vat the girls enjoyed playing with a smaller tub of it.
• We learned about electricity and circuits with Squishy Circuits. They have recipes that make playdoh either conductive (more salt) or insulative (more sugar), and then use it to illustrate those concepts with simple circuits.
• Revisited one of my favorites from last year: the Brooklyn Aerodrome. They show you how to build a cheap remote controlled airplane out of recycled foam board.
• The girls made paper bag puppets.
• In the craft-related shopping area the girls had a good time at the Thumbooks booth.
• Carol and the girls rode the Carousolar: a carousel powered by nearby solar panels.
• We ate overpriced gyros. They weren't as spectacularly good as last year.
• We *really* enjoyed the Sashima Tabernacle Choir (video).
• I got to wander through a whole bunch of robotics and 3D printing projects and products. If you ever feel the need to buy me a $1300 gift, get me a Maker Bot. Make magazine, the sponsors of the fair, have a huge Maker Shed store tent there. I could spend a lot of money in that tent.

We wrapped up the day with a shaved ice and then got on the road home. We were pleasantly surprised to not encounter much traffic through Connecticut. We all had a great time and we'll definitely go again next year. I might even organize it as a field trip for the robotics team I mentor.

Now I just need to find the time to get back to those robot projects...

First Arduino Robot, with Wii Nunchuck Control

I received some generous cash gifts for my birthday and I knew just what to use them for: to buy some parts to build a robot I've had in mind since December. The parts came Friday so I spent my free time this weekend getting the basics up and running. Click the image at left for a short video of the results.

The robot chassis is this kit from Maker Shed: a nice, simple base to build on. The brain of the robot is an Arduino microcontroller. And I also used the Motor Shield from Adafruit.com which is a very flexible and convenient way to control motors from an Arduino. A "shield" is another circuit board with pins that line up with the Arduino's pins so you can just put the shield right on top of the Arduino. You can even stack multiple shields. My ultimate goal is to use my iPhone as a remote control for the robot so it will also have a wi-fi shield soon for wireless communications.

I've had the LEGO Mindstorms NXT set for a few years and have enjoyed it. I'll keep using it and in fact will learn how to interface it to the Arduino. But the Arduino is a much more open and flexible controller. If you google Arduino you'll see that it gets used for an amazing number of creative projects.

I needed a way to control the robot until I get the iPhone remote control figured out. One of the easiest ways to provide directional input is with a nunchuck controller from a Wii. The communication protocol that the nunchuck uses (I2C) is supported directly by the standard Arduino libraries, and the Arduino community is broad, so it was easy to find the code I needed to make that work.

I'm very excited to finally be working with the Arduino. If I can find the time, I'd love to demonstrate a project at Maker Faire in September. And I'd really love to take a robot to the Robot Block Party at the Boston Museum of Science next April. I have a concept in mind for a great demonstration robot that kids would love - it will make souvenirs for them.

In the Arduino open source spirit, you can find the source code here:


Arduino Nunchuck 2-Wheel Control is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

New Old Videos

I recently received notice that Google Video is moving from dormancy to complete shutdown, so I had to rescue some old videos and move them to my current video host: Vimeo. I thought methot.net readers might like to take a little trip down memory lane.

	Belltown Crane Erection: in 1999 a new apartment building was built right outside my apartment window in Seattle's Belltown. I happened to be home the day they erected the tower crane and I made a time-lapse movie of the 14-hour process.
	My Mother the Car: A video from April 2008 in our Seattle kitchen
	The Bed Cave: A video from April 2008 of the girls playing in our Seattle house
	New Swing Set: from June 2008. While the girls were visiting grandparents I assembled the new swing set. When they got out of the car from the trip home they jumped right on.
	Thomas Stop-motion: a stop-motion animation experiment from March 2008.
	Scared Bot: a robot I built with LEGO Mindstorms in June 2008. It is afraid of everything.

Maker Faire New York

Maker Faire NYC 2010

I've subscribed to Make: magazine since the first issue several years ago. I wish I had the time and money to make just about every project they publish. Once in a while I get to make a project with the girls. It's part of my secret plan to make geeks of both of them.

A few years ago they started holding Maker Faires in the Bay Area and I've been waiting for the opportunity to attend. Earlier this year they announced there would be a Maker Faire in New York City in September. Sign me up!

The original plan was for the whole family to go for the weekend. But the girls have ballet on Saturday morning and Audrey has soccer. For some reason ballet feels "serious" and we don't want the girls to miss it if we can help it. So the plan changed to driving to New York on Saturday and coming back Sunday. Carol wasn't interested in that plan, and we figured Audrey would enjoy the fair a lot more than Charlotte, so it became an "Audrey and Dad" trip.

We got out of Boston about noon. I had decided to stop in Hartford, Ct to visit the brand new Connecticut Science Center. Hartford is exactly halfway to New York so it would be a nice break. We spent three hours at the science center and Audrey had a lot of fun playing with water, robots, electricity and music.

Sunday morning we got up early so we could be at the fair before it opened. It was held at the Hall of Science (New York's science museum), which was the site of the 1964 World's Fair.

Well, the fair was fantastic. We started at a booth where Audrey built a marshmallow gun out of PVC plumbing parts. Later she built a sailboat and learned how to crochet (the same publishers produce Craft: magazine). I think the highlight for Audrey was learning to solder. We assembled little badges with blinking lights. Audrey did a great job and was careful with the hot soldering iron.

We also watched a game of Life Size Mousetrap, watched the "Jet Ponies" and rode some unusual bikes.

Another highlight for Audrey was walking in a big tub of oobleck (non-Newtonian fluid). The girls have played with this at preschool and home, but it was cool to get to walk through a huge batch of it.

Finally, we had access to the Hall of Science itself which has a large Science Playground. Audrey loved the big rope web she could climb in.

The Maker Faire met all of my expectations and I'm very glad we made the trip. Hopefully it'll be an annual New York event.

Robotics Competition Videos

As I've mentioned I volunteered as a mentor for the Melrose High School iRaiders robotics team for the 2010 FIRST Robotics Competition season. The 2010 Boston Regionals were held March 26-27 at Boston University. Below are links to several videos from the competition.

We didn't complete construction of our robot until the last minute, so we didn't have nearly enough time for testing. We had reliability problems in the competition: mainly the chains kept slipping on the drive wheels, making it difficult to maneuver. More testing would have revealed that weakness. Next year we'll try to manage the schedule better.

* Overview Video
* Qualifying Match 59
* Qualifying Match 67
* Qualifying Match 77

Puppy Bot

Click on image for video

With the break from school and work I have some time for playing. Last night I decided to build a new robot for the girls. I didn't have enough time to figure out something from scratch. Fortunately there is nxtprograms.com, which contains dozens of "plans" for robots that can be built with the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. I decided on a puppy, since that is Charlotte's favorite thing in the world (well, next to baby dolls at the moment).

The puppy walks forward for two seconds or until he detects and obstacle. Then he looks left and right. If he hears a sound during that time, he'll turn the direction he's looking. If he doesn't hear anything he'll move forward again.

As you can see from the video, Puppy Bot was a hit.

Scared Bot version 1.0

For a couple of years I've had the Lego Mindstorms NXT robot kit on my wish list. With gifts received for my recent birthday, I had enough funds to finally buy the thing.

I wanted it for my own tinkering projects. But lately I've also wanted it as an aspect of raising "geeklets". I'm going to do everything I can to expose my two girls to science, technology, math and engineering-related material. I don't want them to grow up with our society's stereotype that girls "aren't good at that."

They will make up their own minds whether those are fields they want to explore further, but my job is to make the opportunity available to them. I got this tinkering proclivity from my own engineer father, who loves to take things apart to see if he can fix them himself and who approaches every project with an "I can figure that out" attitude.

Another reason is that Audrey has repeatedly expressed a fear of robots. We're not sure where it came from. I've explained to her that robots are just machines that can only do what we tell them to do. Now I can demonstrate that to her.

I figured an appropriate first project was to make a robot that was afraid of Audrey! Thus the first project is named Scared Bot. It cruises around happily, until it "sees" something less than 10 inches in front of itself (via its ultrasonic sensor). When that happens, it jumps back in surprise. Here's a little movie.

As you can see, it was a big hit with Audrey.

I plan to post videos of all the robots we make together in the future.