Show HN: Meet Sid, our Raspberry-Pi-powered office robot | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Meet Sid, our Raspberry-Pi-powered office robot

sidg.tl

133 pointsalexcroox23 comments

God damn Si Digital. It's like the second time I've seen your website but I'm in love with the kind of philosophy you guys seem to have around developing lab projects.

If you're ever in stockholm, hit me up!

Thanks! Did you have fun shocking us for Halloween? We've put the lab notes up for that now http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-halloween

I managed to hit 160. The reason 240 is the max score is that you only have enough time to get a maximum of 3 drops (2 is more likely) so you have to aim for the 80 with all 3 drops.

I think a cool spin-off of this would be to create two robots that can duel each other. Either some sort of Rock 'Em Soc 'Em setup (http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS-Game/dp/B00005BY8V) or maybe something like a tamer version of BattleBots.

I made this for a senior design project at UIUC. No web interface though. You controlled the robots via wireless sensors I designed to be worn on your arms.

Wow that's cool, what robot are you guys using? Did you build the robots yourselves? If so, where did you get parts etc.? And how does the system know when a ball is dropped through a specific hole, which then displays an animation with amount of points?

It's a Lynxmotion AL5A you have to assemble it yourself. We have 8 lever switches under the staging area we built connected to the GPIO pins on the Pi. When the Pi recognises a switch push it tells the nodejs server which passes it on to everyone.

We will post full lab notes explaining everything in detail like we did for our Halloween experiment soon!

Is the control code written in Python (which seems to be the favored language on the Pi)?

Yer the code to control the arm, listen for the lever switches and talk to socket.io is all in Python.

That was fun! I'm surprised how responsive and easy it was to pick up the controls.

Thanks! We worked hard to get the delay under a second. That is of course quite dependant on the speed of your connection as there are 2 streams while you are in control (front cam and ball cam)

Very nice, cool build! Pretty cool that Bryan Cranston (Walter White from Breaking Bad) is in the top 10 as well (shared first place).

Edit - Oh, you can just enter any twitter username without validation, my bad :)

Yer we are pretty popular in the White House and the Vatican

And now, what shall we use to conduct this beautiful current with, hm? What one particular element comes to mind, hm?

Ooooh, wire.

Thanks man, that was really fun! I should try it again, i only got 30 points the first time. I only had time to drop one ball after getting used to the controls, and i missed 80 by about 1/8th of an inch.

I saw that! :)

We want Sid back, bring him back to us! :D

Fighting off a DDOS attack at the moment :(

He is back and I am 45th in the queue, thanks and congrats for this cool project.

This is really cool and great execution

I got kicked out of the queue twice just before my turn. :(

Sorry someone was trying to flood the server so things went wonky for a while

#freesid2013

Right, guys? ;-)

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