little robot with the Hummingbird bit

Little robot is a steal from Tom Lauwers Birdbrain technologies site.

The key idea is to place 2 position servos to obtain flexible neck movement, both left / right and up / down. Follow the link for detailed instructions on the Birdbrain site.

SOME CODE
Here is some code, using variables, to control the robot's head movement using the arrow keys (I wrote some separate code for the video):

Here are some rough notes about what I did, some mistakes I made and how to do better next time:

• Use a bigger box to make a 7.5 cm cube box
• Need to screw into the servos. I forgot and it fell apart.
• Add duct tape to first servo to stop it moving (photo)
• Add duct tape to servos and servo horns so they don't become glued up (photo)
• Mark face position on the bottom cube to avoid confusion
• A smaller thickness of hot glue might work better than big blobs (I read up on hot glue guns)
• When attaching the top cube hold bottom firmly on RHS and press the top cube in, not too hard, in the correct position on the LHS (initially my positioning was all wrong)
• Leave significant gap for head movement b/w top and bottom cubes (otherwise down movement will be restricted)
• Leave RHS bottom door open until everything else finished. I still haven't closed it.
• Calibrate optimal rotations when coding (if you rotate too far you might break it). I settled on left-right 10 to 170 and up down 65 to 115

Extra equipment:

• Small screwdriver
• ifixit blade for prising off dry hot glue when you have to redo
• Super scissors
• ruler 3 inches = 7.5 cm
• duct tape
• masking tape
• googly eyes

Related:
Would you like to see a toilet roll dance?
bee waggle project with the Hummingbird bit

would you like to see a toilet roll dance?

Making the jitterbug with the Hummingbird Bit was another fun project: challenging, quirky, achievable, with an engaging final product.

I do believe that the Hummingbird Bit creates the possibility of STEAM for the 99%

All I needed was a toilet roll, pipe cleaner, cardboard, Stanley knife and an eyelet punch. Everything else was supplied by the Hummingbird Bit Premium Kit: two position servos, 2 mono colour LEDS, one tri colour LED, one light sensor.

Instructions

One tricky bit was figuring out how the position servos were lined up and how to co-ordinate them. Since they go into opposite sides of the tube with rotors on the outside then the front position for one is at 180 degrees and the front position for the other is at 0 degrees.

This didn’t become clear to me until I wrote some code finding the initial positions with an A button press for one foot and a B button press for the other foot.

After that it wasn’t hard to get the feet moving. I used random over a range of 40 degrees to make the dance more unpredictable.

Coding the LEDs was straightforward. The tri colour LED, wrapped in a pipe cleaner, was for the antenna.

Finally, I added the light sensor to trigger the dance once the light faded. Here is the code which is triggered by placing your thumb over the light sensor:

Related: bee waggle project with the Hummingbird Bit

Afterword:
After finishing this project I left it set up and did other things. Later that day, hours later, as the light was fading I suddenly heard a noise and sensed some lights flashing. The jitterbug had begun to dance again as the light faded!

bee waggle project with the Hummingbird Bit

I conclude here that this is a better and less expensive pathway for soft technological artistry than LEGO Mindstorms

This is my first Hummingbird Bit project. It was a fun project. The Hummingbird Bit has an outstanding design.



I had to explore the input and output features of the Hummingbird Bit. The important ones for this project were the position and rotation servo outputs.



Then I had to buy the materials and build the bee. Finally, I had to code the bee to point and waggle.



I've also done an evaluation of how it maps onto the ACARA Digital Technology curriculum and how that process could be made more interesting.

BUILDING THE BEE

The lesson plan provided by BirdBrain suggests that the teacher builds a sample bee beforehand and shows it at the right strategic moment to help the students get on with it. The main challenge in the lesson in the BirdBrain design (where less help is provided) comes in the coding section.



Issues: Hummingbird projects employ craft materials and so end up more diverse and less "blocky" than your typical LEGO projects. Lets call that soft technological artistry, aka STEAM rather than STEM.

CODING THE BEE

If you look at the Attenborough video you see the bee attracts an audience, points, waggles, walks around clockwise, waggles again, then walks around anti-clockwise waggles again etc.

So, initially I opted for the rotation servo because it can move through the full 360 degrees whereas the position servo can only move through 180 degrees.

This, however, was not the best move because of some quirks in transferring code (which makes logical sense or at least I think so) into the physical world. There is a problem here I haven't solved yet but won't go into details because it would take up too much space. Is there a Help Group for such problems, I'll look later.

So, in the end I opted for the position servo despite it's limited functionality in only being able to rotate 180 degrees. The bee turns out to be a smarter coder than me!



ACARA CARDBOARD

Can't help it. From the year 7-8 Design Tech curriculum here are some of the objectives which are covered or could be covered depending partly on how this project is organised in the classroom:

• Define and decompose real-world problems taking into account functional requirements and economic, environmental, social, technical and usability constraints (ACTDIP027)
• Design the user experience of a digital system, generating, evaluating and communicating alternative designs (ACTDIP028)
• Design algorithms represented diagrammatically and in English, and trace algorithms to predict output for a given input and to identify errors (ACTDIP029)
• Implement and modify programs with user interfaces involving branching, iteration and functions in a general-purpose programming language (ACTDIP030)
• Evaluate how student solutions and existing information systems meet needs, are innovative, and take account of future risks and sustainability (ACTDIP031)
• Plan and manage projects that create and communicate ideas and information collaboratively online, taking safety and social contexts into account (ACTDIP032)

I think an interesting way to manage ACARA guidelines would be through Talent Identification as outlined by Jennifer Cross in her PhD. I need to do some more work on that, too. In the process of completing this project I had to exercise

• Improvisation skills in building the bee (the foam shapes I bought weren't all the right size so I returned to Mad Harry's to buy a pom pom for the bee's head)
• Planning skills both with regard to buying materials and algorithmic planning for the code
• Decomposition aka breaking the code into smaller bits, ie. doing the rotation through 180 degrees and the waggle sequence separately and then putting them back together
• Pattern recognition, there is iteration (repeats) in the code for both the bee waggling and the bee rotating
• Constraints with regard to choosing either the rotation or position servo and problems I had with the rotation servo
• Persistence, in particular, in attempting to resolve problems with the rotation servo

In conclusion, I think a strong case can be argued for the Hummingbird Bit as a better pathway for soft technological artistry as well as less expensive when compared with LEGO Mindstorms.

REFERENCE

Introductory video showing the capabilities of the Hummingbird Bit

Program, Build, Teach and Resources for Hummingbird Bit and MakeCode

Bee Waggle video and link to lesson plans

in what mode does the bee code?

Bees are smart coders, developed through a painstaking evolutionary process. Bees have been around for 120 million years.

We humans study bees, can learn from them and model their behaviour. Humans (Homo sapiens) have been around for 200,000 - 300,000 years.

In this blog I'll just show the bees behaviour and my emulation of it. In the next blog I'll go into educational detail. I should acknowledge BirdBrain Technologies for their assistance.

Attenborough explains the bee's waggle dance. To watch in YouTube go here



Here's the simulation I did to partly imitate the clever bee: