Maker Faire Bay Area Robot’s View

Thanks to everyone who helped this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area be so special! We are looking forward to seeing everyone next year and are already improving our show. Below is a photo our booth before the event started. It is hard to believe over one thousand people visited us over the course three days!  

Maker Faire Bay Area

Want to see how our autonomous robots experienced Maker Faire Bay Area? Check out the video below, generated based on the stimuli, emotions, and actions of HipMonsters’ two robots over the course of three days at the Maker Faire.

The robots recorded the following sensory data:

💙 Noise: A sudden, loud noise. Represented by the color Blue.

💚 Distance: Motion within 1 foot. Represented by the color Green.

🧡 Movement: Motion within 6 feet. Represented by the color Orange.

💛 Speech: The spoken word “robotics”. Represented by the color Gold.

💗 Touch: Contact on the touch sensor. Represented by the color Pink.

🤖 Frequency of Stimuli: How often or rarely the robots received stimuli. Captured by the Movement of the cube.

🔉 Mood: Happy or overstimulated. Reflected in the choice of Sound.

Turn up the volume of the video! It’s not music you’re hearing, but the robots’ moods given the stimuli.

Since we engaged the Touch sensor at the end of each demo, this means we ran 420 complete demos over 3 days. Our robots have been well socialized!

YouTube player

Happy Creating!

Bell Hopper – Contraption Delta

For our upcoming Maker Faire presentation we wanted to make robotics more approachable. One barrier to robotics is, by its very nature, it lacks a human element. To bridge this robot-human divide, the bell hopper design requires two humans working together to power and control it. This only one goal, ring the bell.

Please note, this material is provided for informational purposes only and is not a guide on how to create the designs. Please take a look at our disclaimer.

Steampunk robot

The bell hopper ended up very similar to the first drawing of the concept, which is rare for us.  For the base board we used one of our small robot rig platforms. We use it to create supports for testing robot movements. It ended up looking so good we kept it for the final design. We always wanted ringing a bell to be the goal of the contraption, but originally did not think of using it as the head. Once we saw the bell with the body we changed the design to have it as the head because they fit so well together.

Steampunk robot

Here is a top view with the bell attached. The head’s weight caused a few engineering issues for us. The body was made of super light aluminum and the bell was heavy brass. To solve this we create a swinging counter balance inspired by the counter balance in Taipei 101.

air switch

For the switch to redirect the air we used a standard manual pneumatic lever. It is the same one we use for testing our robots.

Bike air pump

The power supply is a bicycle air pump painted bronze to look more steampunk.

Steampunk robotHere is the final design of the bell hopper.

It take two people working together to get the bells to ring. Cooperation is key! Come see it and more at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire.

Happy Creating!

 

Leibniz Calculator- Contraption Gamma

For the upcoming Maker Faire the Hip Monster’s sisters team wanted a challenge. Something that required precision and also aligned well with our theme of education and steampunk artistry. What they choose to do was a true mechanical mind, a computer built with gears, the Leibniz Calculator.

Please note, this material is provided for informational purposes only and is not a guide on how to create the designs. Please take a look at our disclaimer.

DIY Leibniz Calculator

This proved to be our hardest project to date. While videos online had it look simple the precision proved difficult. We first designed a rig composed of separate segments of wood so we could explore different layouts for the gears and rods quickly. Arguable the most critical part, the step drum (the wheel like gear) was completed by the sister team in a few hours which gave us false hope the whole project would be easy.

DIY Leibniz calculator

The step drum shown above is in the center of the device. It was made from a circular piece of wood with nine evenly spaced holes along its edge. In each hole we put screws of different lengths that could be adjusted with bolts to “tune” the device on the fly. At first, we thought this would be a temporary solution but in the end we did not modify it. The device proved to be finicky and our step drum’s ability to be tuned was essential to get it to work.

DIY Leibniz Calculator

Over months of trial and error and rewatching youtube videos endlessly we finally had the Ah-Ha! moment. The rig stayed in the exact same position on our workbench as a parade of other projects were started then finished as it rested, in complete. Then everything just clicked, one sister released that we were thinking two dimensional when the problem was in the third dimension. The the other sister fixed the rig and then the Leibniz Calculator worked like a charm.

DIY Leibniz Calculator

Here is the final design with some added steampunk flourishes. See it in person at this year Bay Area Maker’s Faire. This project only succeed by everyone working together, listening to everyone’s ideas and refusing to get frustrated. In the end it feel more like a piece of art than calculator.

The above video shows the user adding. You use the Leibniz Calculator by first positioning the step drum to the value you want to add, subtract or multiply. Then you rotate the drum. As it spins it engages the counting gear which keeps track of the current value of the computation. The key is, since the step drums spokes are of different lengths when the drum is rotated the counting gear only is turned based on the length of the spokes. You add by rotating the drum clockwise, subtract by counter clockwise and multiply by doing a full rotating the number of time you want to multiply a value by.  For example, if you want to multiply 5 by 4 you set the step drum to 5 and rotate it 4 times.

DIY Leibniz calculator

Above you see the tens dial to the left, showing 2 which is twenty (5X4).

 

Happy Creating!

Bay Area Maker Faire Update

The HipMonster’s team was quiet online over the summer but working hard in our workshop finishing up our educational presentation on robotics, Robot Freedom. Here is a quick preview of our Robot Freedom which you can see in person at this year’s Bay Area Maker Faire.

Please note, this material is provided for informational purposes only and is not a guide on how to create the designs. Please take a look at our disclaimer.

DIY pneumatic robot with bell.

Here is our pneumatic robot designed to put a ring into robotics! Learn how to power a robot by just using your own strength and coordinating with a friend. See how many times you can ring the bell!

DIY Wheeled robot.

Our DIY robotic car is completely controlled by our emotional AI platform. It uses sensors to learn from its surroundings and go in the right direction. See it navigate the world with emotions and learn how you can build one too.

DIY steampunk Leibniz Calculator

Add, subtract, multiply, and divide using our DIY Leibniz calculator. A steampunk computer that you can build at your home. This calculator can do amazing math with a relatively simple design. Before there was electronics, there was gears!

Steampunk autonomous robot

See the updated Number Three, now a fully autonomous android with emotions. It takes in information from a variety of sensors and processes the information to change its mood. Help it learn to not be afraid of humans!

Steampunk autonomous robot (centaur)

And Number Two (our centaur robot) has gotten updated as well. The AI platform will soon be available on GitHub so you can build your own emotional AI.

Number Three and Number Two also have a hidden feature when you activate a certain sensor.

We are looking forward to seeing all of you at this year’s Maker Faire!

Happy Creating!

AI as Art

When designing Robot Freedom, our educational presentation on robotics, the HipMonsters  team wanted to make robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) approachable to a mass audience in hopes of inspiring the creators within all of us. To achieve this, the core principles for our AI design were defined by the Hip Monster’s sister team (ages 9 and 12 at the time), namely, robots should have distinct personalities, emotions, curiosity and be first and foremost pieces of art.

Robot Freedom's AI platform using S-O-R theory.

Given these principles, the foundation of our artificial intelligence framework (show above) is based on Stimulus Organism Response (S-O-R) Theory. S-O-R theory is a psychological framework that enables researchers to explore how stimuli (such as a bell) can impact an organism’s responses, (a dog salivating). Like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell, our robots learn and adapt as they experience outside stimuli and are always eager for more. The robot’s AI is driven by five personality traits that govern how they interpret and respond to stimuli. Below is how a signal from a sensor (stimuli) flows through our AI (organism) and results in an action (response).

Robot Freedom's artificial intelligence platform using S-O-R theory. Agent Stack

Central to the robot’s stimuli exploration is a sensor array of ten sensors ranging from sound to touch. When a robot receives a stimulus, it first processes the information based on its preset personality, then uses past experiences to choose a response based on its personality. Below is a color key to the robot’s sensor display panel.
Robot Freedom's sensor color chart.

 

These experiences are weighted based on the outcome of the robot’s actions allowing the robot to adapt responses to new stimuli. The robots can move, change visual effects, or talk using a chatbot. Below is the full software stack used in our robots.

Robot Freedom's AI platform using S-O-R theory full stack

All the processing is run on a Raspberry Pi and you can download if on our GitHub. Come see this in action at this year’s Bay Area Maker’s Faire!

Happy creating!

Project 75762- Maker Faire 2024!

We are delighted to say the Hip Monsters will present Robot Freedom at the this year Bay Area Maker Faire!

Robot Freedom is a celebration of robotics and steampunk designed to teach kids of all ages the basics of robotic design with fun hands-on demonstrations presented by an autonomous android powered by feelings. See how a mechanical mind works, power a music robot with your own strength, and watch how a robot sees a world filled with stimuli!

Please join us October 18 through 20th!

Read more about our exhibit here.

Steam punk robots going to Maker Faire

Indie Mart in the City

Indie Mart in San Francisco

 

Last weekend Indie-Mart got back into action with an outdoor event in San Francisco.  The weather was perfect, there was lots of vendors and everyone was in a festive mood. It has been awhile since the last Indie-Mart and we are very happy to see event return.  For those of you do not know about Indie-Mart it is a festival featuring indie artists and craftspeople. It is a great place to shop, eat or just hang out.
Indie Mart in San Francisco

 

 

There was a wide variety of vendors this year.  Soap seems to be in the new DIY trend.  The food variety this time was also greatly improved with chicken and waffles and Chairman Bao Bun Truck.  As always, they have a lots beer and wine to choose from. Check out Indie-Mart to see when the next event is.

 

 

Maggie Hurley's Art

I bought a great three piece series of robots by Maggie Hurley that I have been eyeing for sometime. I love her robots.