A Million Useless Thoughts

A bit whelmed at the moment of the project I have taken on in getting COG to work better. While I have no doubt that the tasks can be completed, they need to be listed out and taken down one at a time. At the moment it feel a bit like treading water. The List: AI: Cog needs some interactive capabilities. AIML: A language for bots that can 'chat'. It's fairly simple in terms of it is mostly just a challenge response type bot, but it is a good starting point for make things work. There are other things out there and certainly a few that seem better, but this is free, just poorly documented. And quite possibly the biggest/longest task that may never be finished. Pidgin AIML Plugin: This is give COG an online presence while the batteries are being charged. It will simply be AIML running through pidgin as a plug-in. It is a good place to start for recording logs and trying to get some adaptation/feedback from people. Text-2-Speech: This can be done through

Working COG now that he has a face book presence. But there is a need to make him more interactive if I want it to go well. Any I found this rather humorous with A.L.I.C.E. and Kirk chatting at each other. I am planning on using AIML to with a Pidgin Plug-in to get some sort of interactive presence. Given what I've seen so far. I'll need to put in some work on learning all of this crazy stuff. But I'm having fun with it, and if COG starts out as a very odd on-stage ALICE than so be it. I know I'll have to keep at it to make it all work. Also if you have a picture of yourself try this out for fun. I think I have research to do on all of the stuff they did here. But I can see how it works. Anyway just keeping this blog moving forward.

After letting go of the feeling of disconnection, realized I should embrace the madness in public, instead of only letting people in slowly. So, instead of walking the dogs on roller skates at 4 in the morning where there is no one, I walked them at 4 in the afternoon. As expected people where just staring at the fact that someone is walking their dogs on skate, but who cares, the dogs and I are having fun. I think I'll do that some more. Also Cog is progressing a bit, and I tested his motors capabilities and sure enough cog can pull me on the roller blades. Considering there's a future plan to make cog a 4x4 instead of 2 + caster, he could evolve into a electric vehicle of sorts. We'll just keep pushing this, until they come with the pitch forks and torches!

Maybe I'm not as disconnected as previously thought: Guy Marries Virtual Girl Friend. Or date a robot. Either that or we are all coming apart at the seams!

Feeling a little like the world is just a little different at the moment. And maybe I've always been this way, but just starting to see it myself. I feel slightly disconnected with the world. Not sure whether it the endless posts on facebook, twitter, etc. or remembering that work is a business sometimes, not just R&D, or even sometimes at home. The phrase "thinking outside the box" feels more like there might be a box somewhere, but I'm so outside of it I do not really know where it is. Examples: A friend asked "If you could live ANYWHERE, where would you live?" My first thought was Jupiter or Venus, because the atmosphere would be very cool to watch. That and in my limited travels, pretty much any place is just like any other, people generally have the same goals and actions. Maybe it's that I've only been to more modern places. But it's really just people are people, cities are cities, and maybe that's it I just cannot live in

Finally decided that the robots current name is Cog. I was debating this because of all of the other Cogs out there, but finally decided that because of the steam punk influence in design that it would be a fitting name. Progress so far on Cog: Constructed that ARM kit: It runs on 5 3V DC motors. Which is fine, I have something to play with for figuring out the mechanic. In the mean time, I am attempting to wire to an older version of a IO control board we make at work to control the motors. May need to add some relays to make it work, and will be using 5V instead of 3V, but the motors should be fine. Wii Mote: Utilized GlovePIE and PPJoy to create joystick control for the left and right motors. The current software works perfectly, but needs to be scripted a bit and need to update the hardware to make some of the debugging a little easier. There is a needed box re-design coming anyway. It is fun to drive around and I need to post a video of it, but I want to post both a vi

The two active brain cells are giggling now. No time to blog, time to build!

Starting thinking about how to learn new things and found that nothing really beat kids toys for getting started on how to learn. However, it took a bit to overcome the stigma of they're kids toys. Kids toys have many things going for them over more adult how-to videos and projects. First they tend to be safer, nothing like learning on how things go together then plastic bits that break on your skin rather than sharp metal bit covered in red blood. Second they much more colorful than brown or gray. No idea who thought the world should be gray, but bright color are much easy to find when looking for new bits. And finally they are far more hands on-discovery than a how-to video. When books and video there's still the fine tuning that needs to be learned by doing. The toys have this built in to some degree. Why was I thinking about this? Well, I only somewhat understand the mechanics behind a multi-motor robotic arm, so I decided to order the cheapest I could find. It wa