

Show HN: Meet Sid, our Raspberry-Pi-powered office robot - alexcroox
http://sidg.tl/sid

======
cupofjoakim
God damn Si Digital. It's like the second time I've seen your website but I'm
in love with the kind of philosophy you guys seem to have around developing
lab projects.

If you're ever in stockholm, hit me up!

~~~
alexcroox
Thanks! Did you have fun shocking us for Halloween? We've put the lab notes up
for that now [http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-
halloween](http://sidigital.co/blog/lab-halloween)

------
madsushi
I managed to hit 160. The reason 240 is the max score is that you only have
enough time to get a maximum of 3 drops (2 is more likely) so you have to aim
for the 80 with all 3 drops.

------
mentos
I think a cool spin-off of this would be to create two robots that can duel
each other. Either some sort of Rock 'Em Soc 'Em setup
([http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS-
Game/dp/B00005BY8V](http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Em-Sock-ROBOTS-
Game/dp/B00005BY8V)) or maybe something like a tamer version of BattleBots.

~~~
matmann2001
I made this for a senior design project at UIUC. No web interface though. You
controlled the robots via wireless sensors I designed to be worn on your arms.

------
nickbgn13
Wow that's cool, what robot are you guys using? Did you build the robots
yourselves? If so, where did you get parts etc.? And how does the system know
when a ball is dropped through a specific hole, which then displays an
animation with amount of points?

~~~
alexcroox
It's a Lynxmotion AL5A you have to assemble it yourself. We have 8 lever
switches under the staging area we built connected to the GPIO pins on the Pi.
When the Pi recognises a switch push it tells the nodejs server which passes
it on to everyone.

We will post full lab notes explaining everything in detail like we did for
our Halloween experiment soon!

~~~
thearn4
Is the control code written in Python (which seems to be the favored language
on the Pi)?

~~~
alexcroox
Yer the code to control the arm, listen for the lever switches and talk to
socket.io is all in Python.

------
rotub
That was fun! I'm surprised how responsive and easy it was to pick up the
controls.

~~~
alexcroox
Thanks! We worked hard to get the delay under a second. That is of course
quite dependant on the speed of your connection as there are 2 streams while
you are in control (front cam and ball cam)

------
fijter
Very nice, cool build! Pretty cool that Bryan Cranston (Walter White from
Breaking Bad) is in the top 10 as well (shared first place).

Edit - Oh, you can just enter any twitter username without validation, my bad
:)

~~~
alexcroox
Yer we are pretty popular in the White House and the Vatican

------
raffle
Thanks man, that was really fun! I should try it again, i only got 30 points
the first time. I only had time to drop one ball after getting used to the
controls, and i missed 80 by about 1/8th of an inch.

~~~
rotub
I saw that! :)

------
sebkomianos
We want Sid back, bring him back to us! :D

~~~
alexcroox
Fighting off a DDOS attack at the moment :(

~~~
sebkomianos
He is back and I am 45th in the queue, thanks and congrats for this cool
project.

------
pattle
This is really cool and great execution

------
zupitor
I got kicked out of the queue twice just before my turn. :(

~~~
alexcroox
Sorry someone was trying to flood the server so things went wonky for a while

------
pearjuice
#freesid2013

Right, guys? ;-)

