[Tweets]

18/10/2021 10:24pm
RT @petitegeek: “If we could understand what information the predictive models were using, we could ask for feedback that improved our whol…
16/10/2021 6:43am
This week ends with a finished design for a prototype electric car website. What do you think? Would you buy the ca… [LINK]
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RT @vitotrianni: Two PhD positions in collaboration between @cnr_istc and @SapienzaRoma will open soon. The research focuses on #robotics a…
04/10/2021 9:14am
A new office pet has arrived :) [LINK]
01/10/2021 10:46pm
Just published: A new case study about a website that I made for my research project about robot swarms.… [LINK]

[LED Christmas Tree]

Robots Added on 30/11/2013

LED Christmas treeBuild Brighton, a group of people interested in electronics, robots and a lot of other stuff, have created electronic Christmas kits and are running workshops where you can learn how to solder the components together. The kits include a Christmas tree and a snowman badge, both with blinking LEDs.

I got myself the Christmas tree, it was fairly fast and easy to put together and make work. It is powered by two 3V batteries that are included in the kit and has 12 LEDs that change colour and are simply cool to watch.

The tree itself consists of two printed circuit boards that snap together. The LEDs, two battery cases and a simple switch are soldered onto the boards before the tree shape is assembled. I was told that the batteries should last for about half a day if the lights are on all the time.

If you want to learn more, head over to the workshop’s web page. It runs every Saturday, until 21st December 2013.

And now, watch the tree in action:



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Ilidian the robotic dinosaur

 Meet Ilidian, my robotic dinosaur pet. He is a male Pleo rb, in my opinion one of the most advanced home robotic pets at the moment. He has a lot of touch sensors so he can feel being stroked or hit on various parts of his body, temperature sensors that allow him to feel dizzy when hot or shiver when cold and much more stuff that make him quite life-like.

Linee the line follower

 Linee is a line following robot that instead of being programmed, uses a fully analogue controller board. It features headlights, light sensors, a comparator chip, wheels and other small parts that make it follow either black lines on a light background or white lines on a dark background. This is my first real robotic project ever.

Il Matto: Hello World

 Il Matto is a microcontroller development board that uses Atmel's ATMega644PA AVR chip. It was developed at the University of Southampton, which means that I get to play with it thanks to Klaus-Peter Zauner.

NXTPong

 A custom-built lego machine for playing pong, featuring two controllers connected to the Mindstorms NXT brick. Programmed using NXC.

A Quest for a Better PC

 Since Starcraft II : Heart of the Swarm and the new Simcity are soon to be released, I have decided to finally upgrade my PC. I decided to go crazy and ordered the AMD FX 8350 (yes, it's an 8-core processor!) and 16GB RAM to support the madness. Of course getting it running took much more effort that I could have guessed.

pyCreeper

 The main purpose of pyCreeper is to wrap tens of lines of python code, required to produce graphs that look good for a publication, into functions. It takes away your need to understand various quirks of matplotlib and gives you back ready-to-use and well-documented code.