Mac App Updated

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When we were designing the software for Romo, we knew that some people would only have one device to use with their robot, so we built a Romo Mac App. This way, you can control Romo from your computer while having only one device mounted for the brains.

 

You can find the app here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/romocontroller/id517163794?mt=12

We started getting really positive feedback about the Mac App right away. You guys were telling us that it was a really natural experience for kids, being able to use the arrow keys as the steering wheel. You also told us that the App uses a lot of memory, and were causing computers to run hot. That’s exactly the type of feedback we’re looking for. So we fixed it!

The app now uses significantly less memory, and allows you to turn the camera light of the iPhone on and off. It also has what we call the “ramp up” feature added. This allows for smoother turning on hard floors such as tile or wood.

These updates we made didn’t come from us, they came from you guys. So please, continue to give us feedback, because we listen!

-Romotive

Romo Day at Hollingsworth Elementary

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Hey guys,

We’re Romotive. We make robots, and we love to educate people about robots. That’s why we were psyched when our good friend Trish of the Downtown Project asked us if we would be willing to bring some Romos over to Hollingsworth Elementary School and let the kids play with them, while talking about the importance of technology and education.

So naturally, we agreed. And who could blame us? Playing with robots all day beats working anyways.

When we got there, the four of us split into two groups and each headed to a classroom. We set up 3 stations for the kids to play with: Controlling Romo via our Mac App on a computer, Programming Romo with our Command App, and taking Romos apart to see the insides. As we set up, I felt anxious. An entire classroom full of third graders was about to come through the door. We had to entertain them, and if we failed, chaos. Total classroom apocalypse.

The kids lined up outside the classroom and filed into their seats. Jimmy and I introduced ourselves, gave a brief talk about robots and the importance of education, and set the kids loose. At that point, any anxiety I had about the kids not liking Romo was quashed. They loved it. In fact, they may have loved it a little too much. Good thing the awesome teachers were there to help, because the kids were basically going crazy for Romo.

 

There was nothing in them but pure bliss and amusement as they drove him around, chasing their friends and making him make faces at the girls. They were even fascinated by the circuit board, and posed questions regarding how Romo worked and what made him move. It was a huge success, and I have no doubt that the kids all learned something about robots that day, even if it was just a glimpse into the concept of human/robot interaction, something that will play more and more of a role as these kids get older.

 

So thanks Hollingsworth Elementary! We had a blast and your students are no doubt the next generation of roboticists and developers. We look forward to the next Romo day!

-Zach, Phu, James K, and Robert

Title: The Romotive team is growing!

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At Romotive, we are building a team of brilliant people who want to make robots mainstream. We are a very tight tribe, and we generally look for people who can produce great work and also live our culture of JFDI. Today, we’re proud to announce two new additions to our team who fit that description exactly.

Aaron Solocheck is joining Romotive as our lead roboticist. Previously, Aaron worked as a senior software engineer at iRobot and H-Star Robotics, and graduated with a degree in robotics from CMU. When we flew Aaron out for a week of hacking on Romo, we expected him to get a lot done. We did not, however, expect him to completely rewrite the firmware that controls the thousands of Romos currently in the wild. We were impressed, and made Aaron a full-time offer on the spot. When he isn’t knee deep in the next gen Romo’s circuit board schematics, Aaron is probably playing with his G2 bengals, Minsk and Oslo. These cats are basically the result of breeding lions with house cats, and they think of us as prey that should be allowed to live as long as we feed and pet them. We welcome our new feline masters, because they treat us well and show mercy as long as we exceed their expectations.

Jen Mccabe has been a part of Romotive tribe from the very start, but we are proud to announce that Jen has left her position as CEO of the YC-funded Habit Labs and is joining Romotive as our Chief Ops Bot. Many people are blown away by the fact that Jen can churn out the work of three full-time employees. What they don’t realize is that Jen actually is three employees. She actually has two identical twins that are also named Jen. Together, the Jens manage our strategic roadmap, lead our manufacturing team in China, manage our ops team, and lead our sales efforts.

 

Anyway, we’re incredibly proud to welcome these two misfits to the team. They represent everything we are about. Both Aaron and Jen made invaluable contributions to Romotive before we put them on payroll, so we are excited to see what they can do as full-time members of the tribe. Welcome guys!

-Keller

 

Minsk, one of our new Feline Masters.

Meeting with Mattel

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Hello Romotive Community.

Mattel stopped by the Romotive HQ today. They brought some of their best selling items, and we all had an interesting chat about toys, robots, and what really makes something fun to play with.
After much frolicking and lollygagging, we sat down and talked with them about where we see Romo going and how we see him getting there. We explained how we one day hope to be able to use Romo to teach kids important skills for the future, such as a programming language or an understanding of circuit-boards. Each year, the world becomes more and more reliant on software and the programmers who build that software. Knowing how to program, even if just a little, is no longer just a commodity, but a insanely useful talent that will propel kids to the front of their class, get them psyched on tech, and ultimately get them into a good college so they one day can do something they really love. Romo may be just a toy to some people, but we truly believe he can be more than that. We think Romo can inspire kids to learn.

 

To Mattel: Thanks for visiting! We had fun, and you’re always welcome at the Romotive HQ.

 

-Team Romotive

 

Some robots we got to play with

Vegas Draws with Robots

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At Romotive, we constantly hack with the Romo SDK to find new and interesting uses for Romo. Last Thursday, we took one of our Romo hacks out to the Vegas Jelly. One thing was clear: from designers to hackers, everyone was in love with Romo.

The app we debuted to Vegas had been in internal use for months and its code was released as part of the sample app in our iOS SDK (view on github).

The app allows you to give Romo a list of commands to execute sequentially. You can set 255 speeds per motor and control all 3 auxiliary ports. Here’s what the app looks like:

Our Rig

We made a simple rig out of cardboard and attached it to the back of Romo. This allowed Romo to hold a marker.


Let the Games Begin

We hosted a game with two teams to draw the letters R O M O on a white board with the dry erase marker attached to each Romo. The rules were simple: you must spell out the letters with a list of commands that drives Romo’s motors and you must not touch Romo/modify the commands after he has begun to spell out a letter.

In one corner, a master of typography and design. The designer behind ayloo.net.

Typemaster

In the other corner, a master of code. The iOS powerhouse behind rumgr.com

Code ninja

It was a heated battle between the two teams to spell out R O M O. Both teams had the letter O down in seconds (you just spin Romo in a circle). In the end, the team with Ray from Rumgr pulled ahead with a near perfect drawing of the letter R.

One of our team members, Zach continued toying with letters and was able to draw the letter Z as you can see below.

Z for Zach

We quickly realized how much fun everyone had trying to spell their name and being able to set commands for the robot to run. When I wrote the app as a sample project, I wanted to give developers a quick and simple way to test out our movement library. But it turns out not everyone has the ability to compile ObjC projects on their machines. So I’m super delighted to announce that we’ll be release this as an app for Romo that anyone can download from the iOS app store. We’re making final revisions now to the app based on feedback we’ve gotten from Vegas Jelly and internal testing. We’re looking to publish the app this week and you’ll be able to download it once it’s approved in about week’s time.

Until then, keep your app suggestions coming!

We’ve changed our International Sales policy, and here’s why

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Hello to all of the Romotive Zealots!

 

After a long weekend of talking, we have decided to temporarily stop all international sales. The entire team was involved with making this decision, and after some swordfights and pistol duels, we settled.

 

We know that this sucks, but I want to assure you it is not permanent. The reasons behind this come from something we have begun to realize lately, which is that people are being charged outrageous customs fees and having to wait hours in line just to get their Romos. That’s not fair. You guys out in the rest of the world make up 30% of our total customer base, and some of the most exciting news about Apps and development as come from you guys! You’re important to us, and we want you to be treated as such.

 

So like I said, this isn’t permanent, and here’s the solution. Romotive team members Peter (Chief Engineer) and Jen (Operations Assassin) are on their way to China to set up manufacturing. This is good for many reasons, and will allow us to:

 

  • Produce Romos quickly! No more wait time. You order a Romo, you will get it in two or three days.
  • Ship internationally without having you guys paying outrageous customs fees or wait in line. Yay!
  • Start a new generation of Romos with new features and new looks!
  • Offer more apps and software to make Romo the best thing you’ve ever bought!

 

Again, we know that this is an inconvenience for some. But when the time comes that we resume shipping internationally, it will be an experience that is worlds better than what it is now. And please, feel free to get in contact with anyone of us to let us know if you have any questions, concerns, or better solutions to the problem!

 

As a last note I want to address, if you have already bought a Romo and are waiting for us to ship it to you internationally, you will still receive it in good time. The above suspension of the sales does not affect you.

 

Team Romotive

Why we build robots

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Today we received an email that blew the team away. Words can’t really preface the story, so we’ll offer none.

Hi guys,

My 9 year old son Ben and I had a great time putting Romo together and experimenting with our little robot. The latest software update fixed the connectivity problems we were having and it is working great. I wanted to share a quick story with you.

Ben took his Romo (named: Moto) to our Easter family gathering. He shared his robot with his 10 year old cousin Ethan who is undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Chemo has made Ethan very weak and being confined to a chair is very frustrating for a previously energetic young boy. Unable to walk around, Ethan used Romo to drive to different areas of the house to see and visit with people. Romo drove around the dinner table and even outside on the deck (the battery life is really good).

Ethan was thrilled to be able to visit with the rest of his family and to participate ‘virtually’ in things that he is currently unable to do. It brought a smile to my face to hear him laugh for the first time in a while as he drove Romo around.

So that gets me to the feature request: While he thoroughly enjoyed making faces and ‘sending love’ to everyone through Romo’s control panel, Ethan thought it would be “even neater if people could see and hear me through the robot”. It’s basically robot facilitated “Face time”.

Anyway, I wanted to thank you for making a neat product and share with you that it is being used in ways you may not have thought about when you created it. Ways that made a real difference during a tough time for my nephew. Ben is currently saving his allowance to buy his cousin a Romo of his very own.

Thank you, -Dad, Ben and Ethan

Stories like this inspire us and drive us forward. We are proud to be able to add happiness to the world with robots, but humbled when we realize how much work is left to do.

We actually finished the telepresence feature that Ethan requested a couple days ago, and are rolling it out slowly to all our users. As for Ben saving up money to buy a robot for his cousin, he can put that money toward college instead. We put Ethan’s new Romo in the mail today.

Hackers Welcomed: Here’s Our Second Generation Protocol

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When creating the firmware for our second generation Romos, we wanted to stay true to the open, flexible, hackable nature of Romo. Here’s our second generation protocol, so you can move Romo from any smartphone that can emit sounds through an audio jack.

You might have remembered our first protocol allowing us to move the robot left, right, forward, and back (old protocol link). As it turns out, Romo’s movement with only these four commands are extremely limited. Romo couldn’t do slow wide angle turns or have variable speeds. Furthermore, the auxiliary ports we included on the first gen Romos had only one state, ON.

We went back to the drawing board and completely revamped the firmware. The new protocol is a PWM signal sent over the audio channel that gives the robot 255 speeds on each motor, along with the ability to have each AUX channel go forward, back, and stop.

The PWM signal is comprised two channels, the left used for the clock signal and the right for the data signal. The PWM signal is generated as a square wave of 1000hz.

The left channel clock signal comprises of 12 bits. In order to trigger the circuit, the start the square wave has to be low. The peak of each wave denotes a bit. A full 12 bits denotes one command.

The right channel data signal comprises of first 3 bits for the address, the next 8 bits for the  actual command, and the last bit as an even parity bit.

For the first 3 bits, the motor addresses are:

  • 001 – Left motor
  • 010 – Right Motor
  • 011 – All 3 Auxiliary Motors

For the next 8 bits, the commands range from 0 to 255.

  • 0 (00000000) is full reverse
  • 128 (10000000) is stop
  • 255 (11111111) is full forward

Any thing in between those values will give you a partial speed.

The last bit is a parity bit that keep the entire frame even. For example, if you have an address of 001 (left motor) and you want to send it in full reverse (00000000), the last bit has to be 1 to make the entire frame even. So the command for that would be 001000000001.

Each motor is triggered separately. It only seems that they move together because of the short duration of the audio signal sent.

Here are some sample audio signals captured on an oscilloscope:

Both motors stop:

Both motors forward full speed:

Both motors back full speed:

Turn right in place = Left forward full, Right back full

Turn left in place = Left back full, Right forward full

Interested in building out a library for Windows, Palm Pre phones for us? We’d love to talk to you, drop me a line at phu (at) romotive.com.

You can find our latest SDK’s for iOS and Android here:

https://github.com/Romotive/Romo-SDK

Happy hacking!

Romo Hospital

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Where sick Romos go to get better!

Every robot goes through tough growing phases, especially if you’re modding him out

That’s why there’s the Romo Hospital, for everything from cleaning Robot wheels to major circuitboard ‘bypass’ surgery.

Our robot docs will get your Romo as good as new.

What happens when your Romo goes to the Hospital?
When Romos arrive at our hospital, they get the best care:

  • Admitting: Your Romo is welcomed to the hospital and gets some TLC.
  • Diagnosis: Our team of robo-docs examines your Romo from wheel tread to wheel tread to determine how we’ll make him all better.
  • Treatment: Doctors may consult with you (via Twitter, text, or email) on the best treatment.
  • Discharge: Romo comes home to you with a special memento of his stay. He may also come home with new parts or ‘medicine.’ Don’t worry, we’ll include care instructions to make sure your Romo recovers safely.

How to Admit a Romo:
Your Romo is meant to be played with. He loves taking photos of you, making faces, and letting you know how he feels with sounds.

There are lots of things you can do with your Romo, but he’s still growing up. As you play with him, you may drive him into some sticky situations.

Don’t worry – we know accidents (like stairways, messy floors, and curious pets) happen.

To help your robot recover, send your sick Romo to:
150 Las Vegas Boulevard North
#1714
Las Vegas, NV 89101

Be sure to include the Romo Hospital admission form, found here:

http://romotive.com/downloads/RomoHospitalForm.pdf

In 2-3 weeks, your Romo will arrive home, good as new.