Serial killer on billboard

This is a billboard for the opera Siegfried , last part in the opera-trilogy Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and (duh) Siegfried from Richard Wagner.
The billboard stirred up a quite a bit of commotion in Belgium, but as you can see, it is in the streets now. Their website is also something a bit different from what you'd expect from an operahouse: link

Another BEAMbot... Almost...

This BEAMbot is different in three ways.

1) It doesn't use a motor but the lens-positioning system for a CD-ROM drive,
2) It looks pretty pretty,
3) Errr... It doesn't work as it should. As in: not at all...

Quick and dirty, since it doesn't work, heh:

The Body:

Two bigger and two smaller discarded electrolytic capacitors, glued together after I stripped them bare of the plastic casing, and copper legs from electrical wire (also stripped of the insulator, obviously.)

The Head:

As I said, from a CD-ROM drive. basically it is a bunch of magnets, surrounded with fine copper-wire wound around it with a gap where you apply current, so it moves up or down. The purplish thingy I got from a toy, glued it on the system for a reason I completely forgot.

The 'brain':


A basic, free formed solar engine with L.E.D. The rubber sleeve is again from a discarded CD-ROM drive, it was a shock mount. It is there because in full sunlight, the L.E.D. tends to otherwise oversaturate and stuff then doesn't work.
And it worked, honest, for one split second. I wired it on a breadboard, and the L.E.D. blinked, the lens mount twitched once and then it was dead.
So why didn't I troubleshoot it? Because it was dead, Jim. I obviously fried something I didn't use a solar-cell to power it but a regular battery, an accu, actually, and these pack a lot of oomph these days, so I figured I somehow burned its poor brain out. Desoldering the transistors showed that yeah, one was dead.
I didn't have a spare transitor lying handy (booh! hiss! revoking geek membership!) so the thing just lay there forlornly for quite some time. And I kind of forgot about it.
Then my girlfriend saw it and she thought it was cute, so I 'finished' it as a glorified stand-in-the-way-on-the-coffeetable


it looks kinda nice, but I don't feel very good about it, because it is just standing there, doing nothing.
Nice looking failure.

Email arrives more than three months late...

Got an email today that said 'Happy Birthday!' which is a bit weird because my birthday is January 4. And no, it was not spam, just a thingie auto-mailed from a messageboard. An email that took a little over three months to reach me, good thing email is never used for important stuff, huh?

Silver gelatin rules

Sometimes shooting on old fashioned film and developing it and then printing it on nice paper yields lovely results. This was a picture that I initially thought was a dud, but it turned out quite interesting. I just found it back while going through some stuff, it's dated from December 2005, so not very recent, still I like it a lot because it was one of the very first prints I ever made at home. And no, my sisters' son was not instructed to pose. He just loves cameras, heehee.

Linux software category on Wikipedia no more

The category Linux software on Wikipedia has been eradicated: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Linux_software

Weird, because there is still a Windows and OSX category.

On the discussion page it is argued most programs were not Linux-specific, but IMHO that's hardly a reason to just nuke a whole category.

BEAM robot 'bumper car'

Okay, so I built my 'Calimero' robot, that is to say, the robot itself, only to then discover that building a statuette out of styrofoam and papier-maché wasn't something I turned out to be any good at.

Long cursing and messing with sticky wads of paper story short: I decided to scrap the little project, Calimero looked more like E.T., sigh...

So... I had a functional robot, which worked flawlessly, but...
It was soooo ugly!
I only realised that after I uploade the pictures here. It simply looks like trash, despite it being a happy working robot, aaargh!

So I decided to take it apart and do something slightly different with it:


Presenting BEAM bot 'bumper car'

The modifications to the actual circuit are fairly simple, and look largely cosmetic, but they have their advantages over the Calimero 'bot.

First thing I did was simply bend the connecting diode leads so that now the two solarengines circuits are facing back to back. This has the advantage that now the two photodiodes face outwards, and are more sensitive to variations in ligting-conditions around the little bugger. The two circuits, mounted on veroboard are now is a shallow open 'V' shape, almost, but not completely parallel. I imagine the tapered 'face' of a rabbit, you get the idea.
I was just lucky the leads were overly long so I could bend them quite a ways without them making contact with any other component.

This is another picture of the now re-arranged setup, in my trademark 'splendid' grotty sloppily digitized VHS-quality style as per usual, heh.
The reason this pic looks even worse than the others is that it is in fact a blown up one, and it was hastily level-corrected, because it was totally off-colour, and I didn't feel like taking out the videocam again to make a good one (because that'd entail desoldering stuff from its mount etc.
I told you I was lazy. I'm lazy. I'll keep telling you, watch me.

The black-looking rectangular is a solar-cell from a calculator.
It is the biggest one I have yet found, and it pumps out quite a good dose of electrons :)

I stripped the capacitors from their plastic sleeves, because... Well, I thought it looked nicer that way.

I then bent their leads to I could solder them underneath the two circuits, sitting nicely side by side and they now act a bit as a 'foot' for the whole solarengines+solar cell setup.

No particular reason I did so, other than it made me think they somehow looked more 'engine' that way...

This is the undercarriage. The slimy looking yellow goo is contact-glue, applied rather overenthousiastically, grin.

The two engines are glued to a plastic thingy I found inside a printer I once cannibalized for its stepper-motors.
The nosewheel (a.k.a. pinch roller from a cassette deck mechanism) is glued onto a piece of plastic I salvaged out of a 5'1/4 disk-drive.

Then I glued a stiff electrical wire, partly stripped for visual and err... 'unstickability' effect, in a semicircular shape as bumper.
The rationale being that it prevents the robot to get stuck in corners and even walls, because it has no reverse 'gear'.

This really works, in most cases! When it faces a wall head-on, it starts to nudge in a certain direction (assuming the light isn't on the wall) and after awhile makes a near-complete circle, to drive away from it again, very nice.


On the underside you see the sea of glue...
In this picture of the underside, you see the pinch roller in all its (out of focused) glory. The mechanism wasn't totally symmetrical, so I ended up cutting lots of extraneous parts off of it, for no better reason than to make it look... More symmetrical. I'm not really a perfectionist, but sometimes I like to waste my time with such trivialities. Even though I'm lazy :)

This picture is in some ways the most important one, because it shows how I slightly tilted the motors to give the construction more ground-clearage.

The wheels are so small, when I put my Calimero-bot together, the construction had problems to overcome very small bumps on a surface.
As spacers I used two small flatcable connectors, probably from a discarded computer board. It really helped.

This is the semi-final result.

For fun, and because I'm still a kid despite my age, I added a toy-robot's head.
It now looks like a cross of a racecar and a robot on a wheelchair.

You can see it all looks a bit sloppy, but this pic was before I made the final adjustments of placeing things, and glueing them in place.

And as per usual I forgot to take a picture of the final result.

Conclusion: you too can make a cute little robotcar for less than 10 Euro/Dollars. Or if you use some stuff you salvaged from old equipment you can do it virtually for free.

Calimero BEAM robot

Now that I've finally come around to reach around to the back of my computer to insert an S-video cable so I can digitise some pictures, I am able to (albeit grottily) document some more stuff I cobble together... And waste some more time writing about it here :)

So... Introducing my 'Calimero' BEAM robot.

BEAM robotics is the brain child of Mark W. Tilden. BEAM stands for a triple acronym:

Biology	Electronics	Aesthetics	Mechanics
Building	Evolution	Anarchy	Modularity
Biotechnology	Ethnology	Analogy	Morphology

But in short, these BEAM robots usually refer to small autonomous robots, often solar-powered, and with a minimal or no 'central nervous system' (read: no complex computer'brains',) strongly resembling insects in their behaviour or appearance.

I like BEAM bots, they're very, very inexpensive to build, most simple examples you can build out of scrapped hardware, they're unbelievably simple in design, yet exhibit complex behaviour, what more does one want?

The little robot I hereby document is called Calimero, because it eventually will sport a styrofoam and papier-maché representation of this cartoon figure. Why, you ask?

I could tell you, there's a good reason for it, but it's rather personal, and blogs are already boringly personal enough, heehee! :p

My 'bot of the day is based -or rather: bit by bit slavishly copied from - on Wilf Rigter's version of the 555 photopopper circuit.

In short, it contains two small motors, fed by a solar-cell, and it has two 'eyes' made out of photodiodes. The solar-cell charges a capacitor, which when full, releases its energy to 'fire' the circuit, which drives the engine(s).

So this little statuette of Calimero just sits there, and now and then, depending on how much ambient light there is, it twitches a bit, each twitch a little nudge forward. Because there are two motors and two 'eyes,' it orients itself towards the brighter lightsource, following it, to get even more energy.

So it errr... Follows bright light, gottit?

Now this simple robot could be built very small, but since it will eventually have a little statuette atop of it, measuring approx 10-15 cm., building it as compact as possible is not a priority, so I thought about building it inside a plastic screw-top lid of a big jar.
The reason: it provides a reasonably sturdy yet light-weight chassis, ample room, and the circular outer rim is good to prevent it from getting stuck into corners too easily.

Assembly:

1.) Motors.

Let's start with the very stuff that makes the robot move: bog-standard electromotors.
These are motors from CD tray mechanisms; the black rubber sleeves comes from said same mechanism's vibration-mounts, those are incredibly flexible, and with a bit of effort they neatly slide over the wheels, which come from cassette-deck mechanisms.
I added some contact glue to the mix to make sure the contraption sticks. (Lame pun intended.)
Then I applied some paper tape partway around the housing of the motors, so I don't run the risk of short-circuiting when placing them next to each other.
(And yes: I didn't find my plastic insulator tape, you guessed that right.)

Oh, and to be tidy, I desoldered the original wires and resoldered my own, colour coded ones. The motors were the same but came from different mechanisms, so the wires had four different colours, tsk ;)


2.) Carriage.

This screw-top measures about 8 cm. in diameter, to give you an idea of dimensions...
The two motors and wheels are glued inside it, atop of a piece of scrap PCB, to adjust height. I cut a hole into the top of the lid to allow for wires to poke through, so I didn't have to fiddle too much getting stuff where I wanted it. The trailing wheel is a cassette-deck pinch-roller wheel, made out of rubber. You undoubtedly notice the wheels/motors assembly is fitted in a weird way, that was to make sure it will never run in a straight line, because I didn't want that to happen. I prefer a slightly wobbly way of movement, it increases the chance for the 'eyes' to notice a brighter spot because in this way the robot constantly 'looks' a little bit left and right when moving around and anyways, the screw-lid is too small to allow for a placement that allows a perfect straight way of movement, without letting the wheels stick out beyond the circular edge. I also didn't want that to happen, otherwise it would nullify the do-not-get-stuck advantages of a circular enclosure... (Duh.)


3.) Energy-storage.

Hmmm... I then noticed I had spare room left inside the enclosure so I added two capacitors.
This little robot I didn't take much time to think about in advance, it was so simple to make it possible to take the build-as-you-go approach, so this was a nice bonus. Before I noticed I had ample room to spare, I thought I would assemble the capacitors on the other side, now that's not neccesary, and has the added benefit the centre-of gravity of this thing is nice and low, the motors and capacitors providing the bulk of mass, nice, nice...
The capacitors, you could compare them to accu's; they store the energy from the solar-cell, and when full, they discharge their stored energy in one go into the motors. If you would just connect the solar-cell to the motors, those would never run, because the power from the cells isn't enough. So that power gets 'saved' into the caps, until there's enough of it to make te motors spin for a short while.
These capacitors aren't extremely big: 4700uF, a nice size in-between: smaller ones make the engines fire more often, but the movements then become really twitchy, now they roll a little ways instead of really 'nudging...' I didn't experiment with really small values, but probably will in another robot, giving a near-continuous movement-effect, though probably very jerky, I think it will give a creepy impression of an insect on caffeine, grin. (Yeah, insect on wheels??? That'll look convincing!)


4.) Igor, bring me a brain!

I said these 555-photopoppers contraptions were small, and my statuette was to be reasonably big, so I didn't go for the super-miniature way, but chose to put the ciruits on veroboard. This picture shows the backside, so you can all mock my l33t soldering skills.
In reality it looks much better, remember, this is a shot made with a handheld Hi8 analog camera, and it looks out of focus, which is in fact the digitising going a bit haywire...
Actual size approx 1.5 x 2.25 cm. And you can clearly see I could've easily made it smaller than that. I could've cut off the left side and the top side, but I didn't need really to, so of course I didn't. (Laaaaazzzzzzzyyyyyyyy!)


5.) Igor, bring me another brain!

This is actually the same one, component side, but they are identical, so just to give Igor some work, I pretend it is the other one. Ahem, errr... Right.
Left the 8-pin DIL socket, currently without the CMOS-555. At the right side, on top a simple transistor, and beneath that a photodiode. That's all it takes. All one has to add is some wires to connect it to the solar-cell, the capacitors, and of course the motors. Oh, and two diodes, so they can -partially- share the power, stored in the capacitors.


6.) Sometimes the twain do meet.

I told you they were hard to distinguish from eachother :) Two identical circuits, connected with a set of diodes, so that when one solarengine gets a power 'shot', the other one gets one too, but with a small bias, the diodes make sure the second engine gets slightly less power, so the engines run with a speed-difference, which makes the robot turn.
Now in hindsight, I should've thought about a way to build these things so the 'eyes' were placed more mirror-symmetrically, but of course, at the moment of soldering, I didn't think about this, darn-diddely-dandy! Putting the photodiodes on 'stalks' would be a nice idea for another built into the future, so one can aim the way they 'look'. It would also make the possibilities to built it inside an arbitrary enclosure much simpler. Hmmm... The veroboard idea seems less optimal by the minute.... Designs this simple really don't need to be soldered onto PCBs or veroboard, heh.


7.) It's alive!

So, everything in place, now it's time to assemble the pieces, and add a solar cell...

And it works! Igor it lives! Igoooooor!!!

Ahem. Errr... (Pants.) The trailing wires are testleads, and temporary connections to see whether it really works before soldering the bunch together. These are pictures of Rev. 1.1, which didn't perform very well....

For starters, now both the eyes are pointed upwards, which in itself isn't too bad, because 99% of lightsources come from above, like the sun and a bureau-light, but they capture equal amounts of light in most of the cases which didn't help the critter's phototropic behaviour... So I flipped the assembly 90° and bent the connecting diode-leads so that now the eyes look forward and more sideways, a bit like, say a dog...


Then the solar-cell, sigh... This second picture has the cell assembled differently, in a 45° angle, because I thought it didn't catch enough light, but these cells just... Don't deliver. These cells are cheap, and you can buy them in most electronics' shops, they come in a plastic shell with a transparent top, which contains lenses to increase its efficiency, but, alas, it doesn't help much. I went back to several shops, asking for something better, but the better cells aren't popular enough to stock, so it seems. One man told me these ones are in fact only good for demonstration purposes, not for actual use, argh!

So what to do? Sure the robot functioned, but it was terribly 'lazy,' only doing its thing when the light was very bright and even then it only triggered in big intervals...
The answer is simple: you remember the solar-powered calculators, popular in the 80's and 90's? Those tiny cells are actually much better than this variety, and you can find them for pennies in boot-car sales, attics, eBay etc. So if you spot one, make sure to lay your grubby hands on it.

Now it works better, and has a solar cell that is much smaller to boot.
Picture, you say? Ah, yes.... Maybe one day. (Laaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzyyyyyy!!!!!!)