Hello to our lovely Interns!

I am not sure if you are out of school yet, but if not you soon will be. I just wanted to wish you all an enjoyable, relaxing summer!! We miss being with you and feel free to keep in touch with all our team members through the blog.

Take Care and feel free to come visit in the fall if you wish!!!

Rebecca

Hey I miss you guys. Hey everyone at CMU. I cant believe the robot that we build is at place where eveyone could see it. That is so cool.

Lynxie's Art Studio is in its new home at the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh!

This past Saturday, May 9, was our Grand Opening. With great fanfare of balloons, posters, and a slide show, the finished exhibit was set up on the floor of the Children's Museum and opened for public use. Thank you to everyone who came and helped make this day a success! It was especially great to have our interns there to help with the setup and to have them be able to demo their own project, the tic-tac-toe playing robots.

Here are some pictures from the day:

Grand Opening Overall

Grand Opening Front

Grand Opening Child Drawing

Grand Opening Child Watching

Hey GirlTech interns, I finally got around to pulling the source code for the TicTacToe game you guys wrote from that laptop, cleaned it up a little, wrote some comments and posted them up to this website. You can download the code from the Lectures page here

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/girl-tech/?q=node/167

Let me know if you have any issues or questions. I would suggest you guys read over the code again and try to understand it. Also you still have some work to do in the TTTPlayerAI class to make the computer smarter than it is now (look for the "TODO" parts). You can also expand the game and maybe make it into a Connect-Four game or something similar (way more things to work out there, like the pieces sliding down to the bottom etc). Just play around, experiment and have fun.

Also note that I've included the BioloidArm robot arm code including your favorite Inverse Kinematics math (it's in Armature). See if you can figure out how things are working in there.

This week, only Katie and I were able to attend the activities, I hope evreything is ok with all of the YWCA, we miss you! We visited two diffrent places this week. On monday we met this cool guy who does robot desings. He had lots of diffrent ideas. He showed us Rino, a program for creating designs ( whats with the animal names, Rino, Python, Panda?). He also shoed us a few of his ideas and a few all ready created robots. We got to see penbo again, she danced for us, but we did not know who to get her baby. We also saw the original penbo design, it was more penguine like, and aimed to boys more than girls, but it was awsom looking, I think they should also make it into a robot. We saw ideas for plantanimals, they are robotic plants, they sound like they would be an interesting thing to have around. We also learned a good insperation for design, the Beehive, and some coffee!

I loved the robot desings even the ones that did not become real!

On wensday, we went to this place that had big robots that were not so cute and cuddley, but functioning, working, robots that were not just toys. We wernt able to see all of the robots because some were secret government projects. Most of the robot were big and were veical like. Most were used for agricultural purposes, for mining, and other things. One of the back wheels on one of the robots was bigger than me, so I sat inside of it and it was cool! I liked most about wensday, it helped me form a diffrent outlook on robots, all of the robots I (we) saw so far were toys, I liked the toys a lot, but seeing non toy robots helped develop my rational look on robots.

well thats all for now, no ( 'o') on wensday, but there were some at the ETC on monday.

G.I.R.L. Tech had our Soft Opening yesterday and it was a big success! *whew*

It wouldn't have been possible had it not been for Lauren and Rebecca slaving away making these awesome cabinets til 4am these past weeks (get some sleep you two) and Lindsay for hammering away at that Interface code and electronics/lighting til it was all integrated (I'll admit it, that last minute lighting idea of yours was genius). Laura did an excellent job saving the days multiple times getting all the equipment (especially getting those incorrectly cut canvas plexis straightened out) and writing up all that documentation. And I can't forget about little Samantha ditching school to come out and represent our interns' work at Soft... Awesome job explaining and presenting it Sam!

The faculty and visitors were very impressed by the project and somewhat more impressed by the interns' tic-tac-toe playing robots than Lynxy... which made Lynxy somewhat jealous (older sibling syndrome and all, I can relate :). We were given tons of valuable feedback that we definitely hope to incorporate in the final exhibit... I particularly loved Brenda's idea of a personality on Lynxy... Pixar's Luxo Jr immediately came to my mind when she was describing how Lynxy could animate. Now I need to think of a way to give her a personality (through keyframed animations) without shredding through her servos too much with all those repetitive actions. Ah a good artsy engineering challenge!

We'd like to Thank all the faculty, students and visitors who came by at Soft and all those times prior to test out our little painting bot. We've still got a lot of work ahead of us to finalize and clean things up for the final grand opening in a few weeks.

Today I missed 1/2 day of school to come to the soft opening at the ETC! It was a fun day, I got to see some other projects going on at the ETC, and I got to talk about our project... a lot. Some groups of people ( I think they were staff) came and looked at our exibts, Linxy and ( ' 0 ' ). I didn't really talk about Linxy much but I got to play with her!

I explained to people our tic tac toe robots. ( Anthony Daniels was there too! ) I did not know much about what the other mechinanical people did but I talked about programing. I explained how we found the robots range of motion to creat the tic tac toe board. I talked about inverse kenimatics ( when you know the end point and need to know how the robot needs to move, so you create triangles at the angles of the joints and calculate sine and cosine.). I also explaind how we put that information in to python language. When a person was playing the robot arm, I talked about how we programed the computer play. We had to tell the robot the winning possibilites and tell it to check it and stuff. We also needed to give it a strgedy ( who knew tic tac toe was a stratigic game?) We need to work on that some more, I don't think the computer ever won = (. When someone did win, the robotic arm drew a line across the winning points. I explined that the robotic arm can not draw a stright line unless we broke it down in to Interpolations. ( If we did not break it down than it would draw an arc and not line.) With interpolation, each joint move a certian amount of times unsted of all at once, this causes the robot to draw and etch a sketch like line. Thats basicaly how our robotic arms work.

I also talked about the diffrent things we did through out the program so far. I talked about pengo, keepon, the motion lab, and all that fun stuff.

I liked it a lot because it helped me understand my controbution to the project, and what im learning. I didn't know I knew what I knew untill I had to expain it all. I was kinda just like wow I learned stuff. Well, Im glad I did or this would have been a hard day. Today helped me understand the program a lot more. I liked it a lot, more people shold have came.

I didn't spen the whole time talking. We looked at other pepole projects at the ETC. One project we looked at was creating a sketch for a video game. We created a viedo game with capigs ( we wanted pigs but they only had cats, so they made a cat look like a pig) that played hopscotch. Another project we looked at was a video game. It was a game where you needed to use your logic to play spells to beat you oppents. We also looked a few diffrent other projects but this about sums it up.

It was a fun day, im sorry for those who could not leave school.

Maby the pig wasn't in Star Wars, but the other day in girl tech involved piggys, tic tac toe, and Star Wars!

We finished up our tic tac toe game (tic-tac -toe), and it was awsome!!! We pluged in the numbers and wrote some code in python and the robot arms learned how to play tic tac toe (kinda). We played a few practice games to make sure evreything was working out. Piggy got to play tic tac toe. (that were ( ' 0 ' ) comes in). It was a pretty easy day, and it was fun seeing evreything work out.

Star Wars!!!!! We also got to meet this pretty cool dude named Anthony Daniels. He talked with us to find out what we were doing in girl tech. He also talked about robots and stuff. He asked us questions about diffrent stuff going on in girl tech, I hope he got a good idea of whats going on.

For those who may not know who Anothony is, he plays the droid c-3 PO in star wars. The big gold robot. He told us what it was like to be a robot, it was some pretty interesting insight.

It's Soft Opening!

We have our robot arm displayed as well as the work from our interns (the tic-tac-toe Bioloids robotic arms and photos/slides/video of their semester with us) as well as the cardboard mock-up they made.

All of our work is on display: the robot arm, the intern program, and the grant proposal work I've done for future robotics projects at the ETC. And this website too!

We'll hopefully get some helpful feedback today. ^_^

Yesterday, we finally made up a theme for our tic-tac-toe board. At first we sort of tried to get an idea of what the lilte kids would like or what interest them. Then while we were just painteng on the board. A man with a familar accent comes start talking and helping us try to figure out a theme. After he was done talking to us, Rebecca told us that he was in Star Wars, the movie. I knew he's voice sounded so familar.