Robotics on Blog | Jonas Neubert

PyCon Talk Progress Update: What needs to be in a Robotics Demo?

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a month since my factory automation talk got accepted into PyCon. If you’ve been following along by means of this blog you’ve seen that I bought a barcode reader on Ebay, made an adapter for it and wasted some time figuring out how to do Serial-to-USB on a Mac.

Barcode readers are cool stuff, but when you promised a factory automation demo, reading a few barcodes doesn’t really cut it. The same goes for a lot of other automation equipment like pushers, shakers, label printers and so on: It might technically be factory automation, but nobody comes to PyCon to see tech that contains fewer transistors than the blender in their kitchen at home.

MS3 Adapter for Serial Port and Power

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In last week’s post about barcode readers I mentioned that I purchased an MS3 from Microscan for my PyCon demo. What I had forgotten from last time I worked with the MS3 is that the pin-out of cable attached to the barcode reader is not just a DB9 (nine pin) serial port connector but a DB15 (VGA style) plug. Those extra pins are used for sending power to the device and to accommodate a few extra features, namely trigger and reset inputs.

Intro to Barcode Readers

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

If you read last week’s blog post you already know that I’ve got three months to put together a physical demo for a PyCon talk about factory automation. This post is the first in a series of progress updates.

In robotics and automation, the smallest realistic demo has three parts: Sensing, control, and actuation. I spent Week 1 selecting and bargain hunting for an industrial barcode reader to cover the sensing part of the demo. As I went along I wrote up my notes as an “Introduction to Barcode Readers”; if you only want to know what I ended up buying, scroll down to the end!

Tap, Tap, Tap

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

… is this thing still on?

Besides that Tumblr blog where I collect factory flicks on a NSFW domain, I haven’t produced much written content for public consumption over the past three years. Looks like they even shut down Google Reader because this blog dried up!

But things are about to change! Here’s the plan:

My talk proposal for PyCon 2017 just got accepted (via a detour through the backup talks list). The title that my pressure prompted brain came up with a few hours before the submission deadline:

Robotics Journals Comparison

Sun, 05 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I didn’t get a chance to do a lot of writing during my time in grad school. Ironically, recently I had to do a lot of writing to be formally left out of grad school.

One of the first steps of the actual writing process for a journal paper is to select a journal to publish in. Things to consider are the relevance and impact of the journal, and mechanical details such as limits on page count. None of this info is easy to find, so I set down for a few hours and compiled the following table for seven of the better known robotics journals.

The Cubelets arrived!

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Exciting times in modular robotics land! A former coworker of mine started a company aptly named "Modular Robotics" who, over the past years, developed a modular robotic ~~toy~~ construction kit named Cubelets. After spending years finding out how hard developing a hardware product is, they finally shipped the first batch of 100 beta release kits recently shipped. Being excited about having modular robots around that (unlike my own research modular robots) function reliably, I couldn't resist shooting a short video of my first experiments with Cubelets.