ETC Patio shot

January 25th, 2010

So we did a last minute shot of the ETC Patio (you know where the circular patio tables are next to the river) today using the Bioloid armature in a simple pan shot (180 degree rotation of the base/shoulder).

Our first week

January 19th, 2010

So Team MoCoTiLa spent the first week getting our project room setup… that took us all of 10 minutes… have you seen the size of our closet… er office? Here’s a picture of the office (I’d ask you to visit, but given the available space you might not get past the doorway 🙂 )

We then began setting up our website, threw on WordPress. Other than that we built a very primitive prototype of a robot armature using the Bioloids robot kit GirlTech had gotten two semesters ago. Here’s a picture of the arm:

This is obviously nothing like we’ll be ending up with at the end of the semester, we just wanted to get a feeling for motion controlled time lapse photography and robotics. We also strapped on a cheapo Logitech webcam (with a MacGyver-grade rubber-band). I dusted off my old GirlTech Tic-Tac-Toe playing Bioloid arm control code and modified it to use the new armature. Figured out how to pull an image from the webcam using uvcapture in Linux, wrote some code to move the arm and take a picture (repeatedly, ie. time lapse), then used ImageMagick’s convert command to turn those jpeg frames into an mpeg… and voila we’ve got our first time lapse motion control video:

Welcome to Project MoCoTiLa

January 19th, 2010

Hello World! Welcome to the new Project MoCoTiLa website.

Project MoCoTiLa is a Spring 2010 ETC project focusing on creating a prosumer level Motion Control armature robot. Our primary objective is to develop a platform that can be programmed and used in the field of Time Lapse photography.

Our team consists of Tom Corbett, Mark Bethune, Michael Hill and Charles Daniel. Stay tuned to this website as we’ll be posting our research, progress, blogs and many other things here as the semester rolls on.