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

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.

Well, we're coming up to the end of the semester and the days of Final Presentations and Soft Opening.

Our robot painter paints! We've had successful tests of it copying people's drawings and are currently playtesting it with kids. There have been some minor errors, but it's all a part of the debugging process.

So debugging is underway. The mechies are hard at work fabricating the box and external parts to the installation, such as the front-panel interface an the stylus.

The kids really respond to the Lynxie well. I'm impressed at how patient they are when they watch the robot draw. They're fascinated by her. One of the things I found interesting was that at first, they drew whatever they wanted, then after a few times, they wanted to challenge the robot to draw something more complex, such as mixing colors or drawing more concrete images.

Our original three project concept proposals, as presented to the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh.