Robot Army : Preparing the Army

So I made it back from the frigid cold of northern Michigan alive and in one piece. I survived the alcohol soaked meat fest of Christmas with the family and was just starting to ease back into Kickstarter mode when I came down with this Flu bug from hell which has brought my productivity level down to zero all week. Luckily Mark picked up the ball while I’ve been recovering in quarantine and has been developing code for our twelve delta demo we’ll be touring around town with during CES week. Today, while he debugged our code I did this doodle, because all I’ve been dreaming about while sick in bed is the not so distant future where we’ll actually be setting up our babies in the backyard for some showtime :

With our original six deltas somewhat completed, we have the next set of six to build and optimize. So far, we’ve redesigned  the base to allow easier access to the PCB mounted inside. We’re also thinking about having the yellow arms milled from ABS to cut down on the number of printing hours it’ll take to produce all our parts. We’re making small improvements here and there every day, shaving off pennies from our BOM and improving the over all quality of the robot’s design.

I’m starting to get antsy about the PR side of things though. I sent out a bazillion emails while away in Michigan, and haven’t yet received a response to a single one of them. Now, this could easily be due to the fact that this was vacation week (and I’m the only crazy person who rushed back to work already). So I wont freak out yet.  If I don’t start getting a few bites on Monday, I’ll just have to suck it up and send out more. The key to being successful is being shamelessly persistent, right?

In other news- Cat, one of the awesome people from OSH Park recently did a write-up about Light Play on their blog, which I’m geeked out about. They always do a fantastic job on our PC board prototypes and are lightning fast with the turn around, so I’m happy to return the favor by bragging about their service. =] Again if you are interested in having your circuit handy work professionally made but don’t want to fish around in China or commit to a large order, check out their site!

Robot Army : Kinect and Kinematics

All day Tuesday Mark messed with the delta math trying to map the motors to the Kinect input. It seemed like no progress was to be made until the 11th hour when he ran his code and everything suddenly went from fail to working perfectly. So that spooky kinematics hurdle has now been cleared.

Today is turning out to be a bit stressful. I’m preparing to leave for a ten-day winter pilgrimage back east to visit family, and as such am going over a list of things that Mark and I must both take care of over the duration that we are not conjoined at the hip. He’ll be handling all the tangible stuff – while I crunch numbers and go into deep marketing mode.

In other news, we were able to do some actual “light playing” this weekend. As a member of our hackerspace suggested, it would be really neat to see the delta robots paint with their LEDs in some long exposure shots. After another round of promotional pics, we took a robot in the bedroom, set the tripod up and turned out the lights…heh. The result was magical :

I can’t forget to mention that Rev B came in from OSH Park. WOO! If these work, I’ll be ordering another handful this week so that we have enough brains in time for January. With luck, our demo size just doubled from three to six- if not, I have new fancy pasties =]

Interested in making a delta robot? For the full scoop on Light Play, visit : lightplay.zoness.com