SassBot Construction

Great to see the boys again! It'd been about a couple months since seeing each other in person so it was nice to catch up and have a closer look at the progress of each component. Anshuman had been working on the main body of the robot. His eye's light sensor, ear vibration and mouth lights were all working well. His latest feature was a nose knob that could adjust the mouth lights. Tim showed off the IR emitter Tv controller which was cool. I showed the boys how specific sounds could be played and output settings adjusted such as volume. Combing each part proved to be harder than anticipated.

We started by adding my audio component to Anshuman's Arduino board. Despite wiring up perfectly, the board had problems registering the DFMiniPlayer. We spent a while reinstalling libraries and adjusting the wiring until we eventually got it working. We never pinned down what the issue was since the code would randomly throw errors. We decided that soldering these components together may be necessary to avoid faulty circuits. Nonetheless, during the time that the DFMiniplayer did work, I added some code to anshuman's program to make a happy sound play when the robot smiles, and a sassy comment when it's angry. Here's an example of this working:

Integrating Tim's component proved to be even harder since he ran his program using an ESP32 board. We managed to connect the two boards, but we couldn't get any sensors or components to work. After seeking the help of the tutors, we narrowed this down to not providing enough power to the boards. This way as far as we got on the Sassbot - solid progress.

To finish off the session, Tim showed us his progress on getting facial recognition working. The idea was to get the Roomba to move towards and face the user by connecting his phone camera to the Arduino using bluetooth. It occasionally worked... but it was fun playing around with it anyway.

Reflection

Spending the day with Anshuman and Tim was a lot of fun. It was good to get our hands dirty trying to integrate our parts. Debugging with friends is always a good time. We made some solid progress putting together the Sassbot, it's finally taking shape. In the coming weeks we'll aim to get everything working cohesively to begin designing some interaction plans.