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Gigabrain — Record and playback movements for your robot
It's really an easy way to record and share movements with friends and devices. Create yourself a 3d printed robot thing. Runs in Raspberry Pi 3 using a mobile phone.
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I was a kid back in 80s when our RC trucks servo motor busted and I opened it to examine what was broken. Then I realized that this was an interesting piece that converts electricity to movement. And I thought back then that how would it fit in a robot arm and in what ways to move it. Then I learned to program with different programming languages, but using a 386 PC there was problems to program a serial port to send a steady PWM signal to the servo. I left the ideas to grow and learned to make electrical soldering boards in school.
As older I tried it again with a BeagleBoard, but the idea was not in it's prime back then and I left it. At the same time I thought about this new technology that Torsten Reil had developed, using AI network to control single joints of a biped movement. I wrote to Torsten and suggested to make an Open sourced platform from their technology back in 2009, but there was no answer then. Then I decided to start making my own testing platform, first the idea was to make a simple role playing game like older Elder Scrolls games and to create character movements with AI. That was a tougher job to create and the project got halted. Here's an example https://code.google.com/archive/...
From there I thought that what would it be like to combine the technology that's used in computer games to robotics. Not meaning that robotics would have same features as computer games but thinking the ways how animation moves characters in 3d space.
So the newest project came with these ideas and is resulted in a new movement library. It's a library where you can store movements and modify and share them. With different configurations you can play the same movement with servos or different kind of serial connected actuators. The movement data itself is licensed with LGPL and there's a premium controller in beta test that offers a movement storage and playback inside from the Raspberry Pi device.
You can attach movements to Thingiverse objects where you can show the models and the configuration of the servos.
Hope to hear feedback from you soon and what you think!
Gigabrain