Okay, I am now well involved in the phenomenon that is twitter, and for those interested it is http://twitter.com/dannystaple.

I have been thinking about AI's and chatbots for twitter and will be figuring out which I can adapt myself. However, there are plenty of clever tweeps out there who might be able to code their own or adapt something.
Bring out your Twitter AI's! If you simply pipe twitter to Alice or Eliza, or even Psychoanalyze-pinhead, code your own complete AI, dust off and bring out NIALL then I want to know here.

So here - put your best twitter chat bot forward - a link to twitter to follow, as a comment, and tell us a little about how it is written. I will be getting people to test it from around the twitterverse (is that a word?) at silly hours of the day, to ensure it really is a bot (it may be hard to prove this bit).

So go on - give us your best, chattiest bot - I want to hear from you. Let the OrionRobots Twitter Turing Test Begin!

For those who want a short name, I am thinking Twuring!

Rules:

• Must be on twitter - with its own profile.
• Twitter profile should state it is a bot, and an entry to twuring.
• Be prepared to tell us a little of how you did it (enough to prove it is a bot and not a fake) - a link to a blog/article about how you did it would be good.

Update:
This is now being tracked (including a twitter widget to see recent activity) on http://squidoo.com/twuring.

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After a few years in the making the new look, feel and most recent Tiki CMS code have arrived to Orionrobots!

This has been a major effort in design, testing and preparation for myself. To have it finally live is a huge relief. I expect there will be teething trouble, so please use the site feedback forum to feedback any problems.

New features include:

• The new Orion Technologies brand and logo are introduced. While OrionRobots will still talk a lot about robots, this marks an acceptance that other technology is just as interesting to me, and will be written about on the site. Expect to see more other hi-tech articles as well.
• Tags - while there were some attempts (half-baked) at site tags before, newer articles (and some revised ones) can now have real tagging as they are created. This is still under test.
• Commenting issues fixed.

Known Issues:

• Currently this may be slightly slower as the page templates and caches are created again.
• A number of minor and annoying stylesheet issues.
• Old techtags (my previous tagging system) will no longer show properly.
• Some of the old drawings may be missing - and need to be updated to the new formats.

I have ironed out (I think) any very serious problems, but hope my readership can let me know if they spot anything I have missed.
Enjoy - I think I am going to have a party now that this is finally done.

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Buying consumer level robots for the home in the Uk can still be pretty difficult. The Roomba has proved pretty hard to come by. However, Robots Inc are a company who specialise in exactly this.

As well as a number of articles on the state and future of robotics, they stock some great robots including:

• The Roomba - a robotic vacuum cleaner.
• I-sobot - A very small servo driven humanoid robot.

There is more on the site, so I recommend taking a look.

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A Happy New Year to all my readers.
2008 has been interesting to say the least. Here are what I see as important for OrionRobots:

	It has brought us the first true to market fuel cell car - the Honda FCX Clarity, which by pushing fuel cells further into the mainstream, brings the possibility of seeing them in robots and laptop computers closer.
	2008 has also brought the economic gloom we know, but this may be an opportunity for change. While companies like Woolworths, a fairly old UK High street chain, have sunk under, companies like eBay and Amazon have had the best year ever - online shopping has almost become the main method during the Christmas rush.
	2008 was the year of the NetBook - small form factor laptops, very light, cheap and good battery usage. The ASUS eee PC is a great platform for sitting on a robot - with a built in camera, WiFi, USB ports and an SD port, linking it with a microcontroller to play horse and rider makes a lot of sense for more complicated robots.

And 2009? Who knows - I hope it will be safe, prosperous and bring more technological delights. Perhaps the new economic situation will bring out the maker in people, so they will be more ready to bring out a screwdriver and fix or tinker with things. Perhaps it will also bring out the community spirit a little - you may actually get to know who your neighbours are.

So here are a couple of tips I have for 2009:

Road Safety - Don't Die Rushing	OrionRobots has always been very hot on keeping its readers safe. Consider this, nothing you are trying to get to, be it a wedding, job interview or exam, is so important that you should risk your life to get there. Better planning may avoid you needing to as well.
Use Thinking Rock to plan	Talking of planning, this is a good habit to get into. Thinking Rock is some great multi-platform computer software for planning.
Start some seeds	Although robots are fun, don't make it all that you do. Try growing something, take some supermarket tomatoes, squirt the seeds onto a tray and grow them! This link will show you what you need to get them started.

Whatever you do, have a great and safe new year. No matter how bad it seems, do not overlook the opportunities it may present.

Terms used

• Fuel Cell
• WiFi
• USB
• More about OrionRobots
• microcontroller
• Horse and Rider

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As usual, this year I had fun ensuring that Christmas lights worked again. However, I had a crafty idea on how to speed to process up - and wrote about it.

HOWTO: Fix Broken Christmas Lights Quickly

The crafty bit is the use of what the more technical readers will recognise as a binary search - dividing the haystack each time, leaving significantly less space to search for the next iteration.

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As readers probably know, robotics is not my only obsession. So from time to time I write about other technologies and stuff.
PortableApps? is a really cool tech that lets you install your favourite apps, along with their configuration and user settings onto a USB device or removable drive. It is free software for windows and I often use it to write and modify stuff on orionrobots.

Read more here - Using Portable Apps to take you applications with you.

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Halloween presents a great time to build and exhibit some scary animatronic creatures. In fact, some of the robotics kit that is now taken for granted was developed for movies using animatronic techniques.

Those techniques have been used to great affect in films and now this is quite accessible to robot builders. Looking around on intructables, just before halloween has revealed a few cool but creepy instructions on building your own animatronic horrors.

The Rat

First up - the Animatronic Rat. On instructables.com, some chap has created a rat which uses servos to move, has creepy LED eyes, and can squirt victims with water from a jet in its mouth.

The Animatronic Rat

The Simple Reaper

This animatronic reaper is simply an oscillating fan, with a mask, sickle and cape. It is still pretty creepy and cool though.

Grim Reaper Animatronic

A bunch of potential jaw dropping animatronics

Finally, another builder submitted how to do a skull with moving eyes and mouth, and a talking pumpkin using servos, and a controller. This includes some really fiddly connections, but they are shown up close and in enough detail to have a go. It also shows the software and techniques used to bring the gear to life.

Halloween Animatronics

More

Have a good look around instructables - there is plenty there to build. Enough to keep anyone occupied. I would also encourage my readers to submit their own cool builds and how-to's there too!

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Shannon (in yellow) and Chloe (in pink) were the only two girls in the whole competition. There is currently a disappointing tendency for robotics to be (like engineering and computing subjects in general) a very male dominated discipline. To meet two young ladies, who are not only interested, but built their own robots and competed in the challenges, is a real breath of fresh air, and proves that girls can have fun taking part in these things.

I spent some time chatting with the two sisters. Their father, Derek Hall, entered the robots that took first and second prizes in the non contact maze solving event, and has been a MicroMouse? champion for 4 years running, so it kind of runs in the family. It all starts there, and Prof. Martin Smith even remembers Chloe being hauled along to MicroMouse? events when still in the pushchair.

Their Robots

Chloe has been building robots since she was 9, and actually brought two robots to the 2008 event. They were Snoopy, which is entirely her own build (although she borrowed some ideas for it from her older sister), and Redeye, a robot that she has maintained for a while. Both are quite creative and different.

Shannon built the robot Cheese Detective - a robot based on simple electronics and uses a part of a CD, Snoopy is similar in that it is also based on simple electronics and uses a CD for a sensor. However, it does have differences. Snoopy is smaller and lighter for a start, and the CD is at the bottom of the bot instead of the top-heavy cheese detective. Snoopy is not without its problems, and during the drag race it demonstrated it needed a new gearbox due to pulling to the side a lot while running the race. Snoopy was also once the "Easter Chicken Bot", and had a small chicken mascot stuck to it, although that fell off. I did point out (in jest) that perhaps "Woodstock" would have been a more apt title.

Chloe’s first robot was Slowpoke, and later "Not-So-Slowpoke", an all mechanical robot, that (according to Chloe) would simply drop out of the end of mazes when done.

More about Chloe

Chloe enjoys building robots from junk, and uses materials like broken CD/DVDs (as mentioned above), credit cards and other stuff. As you may know, we really like robots built from junk on OrionRobots. She also likes to decorate her robots, an area that was mostly lacking in many MicroMouse? robots. Although we like to see the guts of a robot, a little bit of presentation and not taking it too seriously also help.

Chloe is now 15, and is just getting on with her GCSE’s at the Stanway School, Colchester. There is a robotics club, and she is trying to start a separate MicroMouse? robots club at the school too. She has been able to use a well kitted out DT lab at school with plastic moulding, laser cutters as well as simpler hand tools, and also borrow tools or materials from her Dad’s robot building kit, although that is going to be on the terms that she uses it safely, looks after it and returns them I suspect.

Both Chloe and Shannon were pretty interesting to chat with, and clearly knew their stuff. They both also conveyed the message that it would be good to see more girls in the show, and even more contenders in their age group who are not school affiliated. If you are able to build robots, now is a good time to start reading up about MicroMouse? and preparing your maze running robots for the next event.

Challenge to any takers

Do you think you have what it takes to beat these two youngsters? Who took first and second prize in their competition?

Links

• Shannon has her own MicroMouse? site at The Mouse House. She suggests it needs updating, but that is because she is spending more time actually building bots.
• There are more photos of Chloe, Shannon and all the MicroMouse? robots at our MicroMouse UK 2008 gallery

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I recently attended the Micromouse 2008 event at Millenium Point in Birmingham, so I could watch superb robots try their luck in the maze, and meet a number of other seasoned and not so seasoned robot builders.

About Micromouse

Micromouse robots are REAL robots. They are not remote controlled, and must come with all their own control circuitry, at least those beyond a certain cheeky number (well letter actually).

Micromouse has been running for a very long time, since around 1979, when the Amazing Micromouse Maze Contest was held. I last attended one when it was held during a Tomorrows World Megalab event in the NEC in Birmingham.

Micromouse is held once a year, although other similar events are held throughout the year. If you enjoy building robots, or simply want to meet with other robot builders, this event is highly recommended. It is even better if you turn up with a robot to try in the games, although I did not this time. You will be able to exchange tips and techniques as well as being able to test the robot in a pretty serious event.

The current event

UK Micromouse 2008 was hosted by Birmingham City University and ThinkTank?, an interactive science museum with a regular robot club, and Lego robolab events.

The maze itself was based on a large board with holes for pegs, and a system of pegs and walls used to construct the mazes. There was more than one maze - a maze designed for non-contact maze solvers, and a smaller, simpler maze for the contact followers.


Because this is a gathering of robot builders, a number of other competitions and side events, such as line following, drag races, walking robots, robot soccer, mini-sumo, walking robots and just general showcasing of robots gear take place too. There was also plenty of kit (ie oscilloscopes, soldering gear, multimeters, logic testers) for testing and debugging robots.

The mazes used a timing system that is based on infrared sensors to detect when the mouse has left the starting square, and when it has entered the goal area. This could be armed with a control board, and the numbers fed into a database system so they could be used to create scoreboards later. The system worked fairly well, although there were a few issues, and the automatic sensor triggers had to be turned off for a particular group of robots based on the same kit.

Among the most well known there is probably Professor Martin Smith, known for being a judge on robot wars and having built robots himself too. He lead the proceedings as the Master of ceremonies, gave commentary to the finals and was also quite good just to chat with - a very down to earth guy.

Also present was Chris Hills of PheadruS SystemS Ltd who normally works with real time embedded operating systems for control engineering applications, although at the event they were also flogging off a bunch of development boards at £15 or less. The chap also writes for Embedded Systems Engineering. He donated the development boards and kits that were awarded as prizes.

I will be following this up with a number of posts based on interviews, and less formal chats I had with some of the characters that attend this event, so read on for more!

I have also posted a photo gallery at The OrionRobots Micromouse 2008 photo Gallery. While I work on repairing the photo gallery comment system, please leave any comments intended for the gallery on this post.

Links

• The OrionRobots Micromouse 2008 Photo Gallery
• Professor Martin Smith's own site on Micromouse
• Micromouse at the TIC
• Micromouse Maze Solver Results
• Micromouseonline on the UK Micromouse 2008
• previous blog entry on Micromouse at APEC 2006
• PheadruS SystemS Ltd.

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As I have been looking at wiring up my flat, I have been thinking of ways to conserve power and space - cable space that is. There is nothing I am more interested in right now than ways to banish "wall warts" - the many, many small 12v DC adaptors. Nearly every device has one, my mobile phone, landline phone, the NAS, monitor, printer, microcontroller programmers, guitar effects unit. The list actually goes on and on.

Even the PC has its switched power supply supplying DC to most of the components. Why am I having to convert to DC over and over?

So I started looking at alternatives. Could one decent switched power supply sort this out?

I am aware of the issues. First - each of those power supplies has different voltage and wattage outputs for device requirements. Devices must not be overloaded, or underpowered .Also, any solution must not load up one mains plug over its own rating. cables for power delivery must be safe and have the correct wire pitch and insulation. It needs to be able to safely deal with surges, and for my requirements work out as a relatively inexpensive product.

The system needs to be in the market presently, or shortly available (in the next 6 months). It should also, preferably link up with the data solution, as a number of devices also have a data line to go with them, although the data requirement is not really essential.

I have come across a few potential ideas for this, some are products on the market, some are things I could homebrew. That is an interesting trade off, as while I like doing homebrew, this is electrical power, and although the voltages are low, a semi-permanent installation like this needs to be bulletproof. Also, it needs to be fairly readily expandable, and an off-the-shelf solution is going to be somewhat easier.

That then throws up one last problem, is that the availability needs to be good. I do not want to invest in a system that will disappear in a couple of years, that was created by one obscure group or company - the system needs to be pretty standard, and the standards well documented. Preferably not too heavily patent encumbered.

Tricky customer aren't I?

Possible Solutions

Wiring a 12 volt rail through the house

An old friend lives in a house out in the moors, where he generates his own power through both a diesel generator and a wind turbine. The house came with very old wiring, not really suitable for safe use at 240 volts. He hired an electrician to wire the 240 volts, and converted the old wiring into a 12 volt DC system.

• Pros
  • The system was there, readily available. This included wiring, and old style electrical sockets.
  • Takes up little space.

• Cons
  • My own flat and most others have no such system, and while I would condone new builds to have some such line, it would be very expensive and messy to retrofit.
  • Devices that take less than 12 volts will have to have regulators, and devices which take a little more will be a problem.
  • The lines will be pretty noisy, and therefore additional smoothing is probably required at device endpoints.
  • No data lines.

In conclusion, while it suits him well, it is probably not appropriate for myself.

Greenplug

Greenplug are a company producing a single power unit to replace many power units. They are also courting consumer electronics manufacturers to try and get them to ship Greenplug cables instead of wall warts.

• Pros
  • This is a set of good look devices.
  • This has potential if it is supported by the manufacturers.
  • Negotiable power - means that devices will be able to request power, no switches or matching.
  • Power saving - devices may be able to inform the greenplug when they go into a low power mode or have stopped charging.
  • Based on a hybrid USB universal connector.
  • Can offer basic USB power for normal USB powered devices.

• Cons
  • Not yet available in shops.
  • Likely to be expensive.
  • Hubs do not have many ports.
  • Manufacturer support not yet available.
  • Only one company is currently building parts, although there may come a point where it is simply licensed commodity technology.

This is a possible solution, although I would have to wait a while for it to become available.

PoweredUSB

This is a standard created by a consortium of companies, designed for use in the EPOS (Electronic point of sale) realm for retail groups.

• Pros
  • A standard supported by a number of major players, including IBM and MS.
  • Offers a power management system like Greenplug.
  • Connectors come with clip on parts to make a more secure power connection.
  • Offers data and power.

• Cons
  • This has crippling patent encumbrance and may be extremely expensive due to this. This includes the power management system.
  • Not widely available - most devices are only in EPOS realm.
  • Standards for device connection are not agreed upon yet, with different manufacturers using different methods.
  • Not really available for consumer level usage.

In conclusion this is not really a player. The expense, encumbrance, the lack of standardisation for end points and distance from consumer devices is a bit of a put off. For now, this is not an option.

PoE and 802.3af

This first sounded like a bit of a joke, an April fools. But it turns out this is a real and readily available way to send both power and data over a single cable. It is also a standard, implementable by many.

• Pros
  • Readily available - I can go to Google and find devices to purchase right now.
  • Works with existing Ethernet networks - 10/100.
  • Reasonably cheap with low, mid and high end ranges.
  • Fully standardised with a few satellite standards.
  • Homebrews well documented and circuits available.
  • Scales through voltages based on a resistance.
  • Done properly is still compatible with non POE devices.
  • Been used in the field for a while.
  • Uses very common and cheap Ethernet Rj45 plugs, and standard Cat5 cabling.

• Cons
  • done very cheaply it is not compatible with non POE devices.
  • The voltage selection seems to only be negotiable at start up, and cannot adapt to device requirements like the Greenplug.
  • May not be compatible with gigabit Ethernet apart from high end range.
  • Ethernet network may not be available (but in my case it is).
  • Will probably need splitters at end points for all the devices that do not yet use PoE.
  • Ethernet connectors and splitters considered relatively large when compared with Greenplug.
  • Not usable directly for USB powered devices.

This is probably the most appealing solution yet. There are even whole thin-client terminals based on PoE.

Readers Call to action

I am relatively sure that I have only covered a very small portion of the possible ways to do this, and there are more to consider.
So do you know any systems? Could you advise me, or tell me your experiences with these devices? Maybe you are a company with products like this trying to make yourself known - in which case you are free to leave a comment on this article with a link back to your site.

Links

• Greenplug
• Powered USB on Wikipedia
• Powered USB site
• Power Over Ethernet on Wikipedia

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