Digital Gaming Table Quick Prototype

I’ve been fascinated by the digital gaming tables I’ve seen on the net for a while now. This weekend I got the bug and decided to see what I could do with just the stuff I had lying around the house. I already had a small Ikea table and ceiling mounted projector up in the loft, so I figured I would try a top-down projection by placing a mirror in the beam path. A quick search out in the garage turned up a donor full-length mirror*. I cut it down to a decent size and proceeded to stand on a chair, holding the mirror in place to get an idea of how it would look.

It wasn’t too bad. Obviously I would eventually need to switch to a front surface mirror because I got quite a bit of ghosting, but the image was usable. Now I just needed a way to hold the mirror in place. Another rummage through the garage and I came back with an Ikea clamp-style goose neck lamp with a teeny burned-out halogen bulb. I knew it was unlikely I’d ever get around to replacing the bulb, so the lamp was harvested also**. Here’s the result:

I have checked several times to make sure the mirror isn’t getting hot, because I don’t want the glue to give way and drop the mirror crashing down on the table. No problems so far, it’s not even getting warm. Not bad for an hour’s worth of prototyping! And when I’m done, I can just un-clip the mirror, re-focus the projector and watch movies again.

*Every time I find something useful out in the garage, it reinforces my pack-rat tendencies. By this point in my life, I think it’s hopeless.

** See? There’s another one. Good thing I saved those, instead of getting rid of them!

Syndicated 2012-03-25 22:04:34 from robotguy.net/Blog

Beagle-Book Update

Doesn’t look a whole lot different, but I’ve added a small cooling fan for the DLP and it’s been rewired to run from a single 5V@2.6A wall wart (sorry for the shoddy cell-phone pic) :

Syndicated 2011-06-24 19:37:58 from robotguy.net/Blog

Beagle Box

I got a BeagleBoard for Father’s Day. My plan is to put the BeagleBoard, the Pico Projector and a battery in a small box, write some ALife software and carry around a virtual world. Tonight I started mounting the board and projector inside a fake book:

Syndicated 2011-06-24 04:55:12 from robotguy.net/Blog

Simple Embedded Architecture for Robot Learning and Emotion

I’ve been working on a paper about robot learning for over a year now, more as a place to organize my thoughts than anything else. This paper outlines some ideas I’ve been having about how to implement a learning system that let’s a robot relate state-action sequences to a result. It’s still extremely sketchy, but I thought I’d make it public:
Simple Embedded Architecture for Robot Learning and Emotion
Sorry for the shoddy formatting, but that results from publishing a Google Doc as HTML.

I also have a few background documents that may be interesting* to some:

Senses/States Matrix
Emotional Effects on Outputs
Robot Emotions versus Movements

My current mental obsession is an ALife simulation running under Linux, and I thought I would try out this learning architecture in a simulated environment on a capable processor.

*I find this stuff extremely interesting, but then according to my teenage daughters I’m weird. Of course they think weird is a compliment.

Syndicated 2011-05-25 18:55:36 from robotguy.net/Blog

Photo Competition

My Favorite Photo (I’ve Ever Taken) 3 Brickfish

Syndicated 2011-01-10 16:46:10 from robotguy.net/Blog