BowlerStudio: A robotics development platform

I just posted an Amazon wishlist for all the parts you need to make the standard Carl the Hexapod.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/C1SQC7YAFQFT/ref=cm_wl_list_o_1

I added JBullet support to Releases of BowlerStudio 0.8.0+. This means your kinematics, walking, simulation scripts can all take into account physics as part of your control schema. This will also allow me (or some ambitious contributor) to add a full simulation environment for creatures. This will let you test walking gaits to see if they will work in the real world of physics.

This project is starting to feel more and more like a game engine targeted towards designing robotics and engineering tools.

I updated all of the introduction tutorials and reordered them a bit. i want to give you an ide of how the system works and how you would build things with it more slowly before introduciing specific library features.

I just added a new step to the intro. If you already have BowlerStudio, just navigate here:

http://neuronrobotics.com/BowlerStudio/JBulletPhysics/

I never thought i would be so amused by a bouncing ball...

And run it. You should see a Sphere created by JavaCad animated by the physics engine. I have a lot of work to do to define chains automatically from th DH system, but i think i could model a rigid body comprised of spheres representing feet for the walking robots. If i manage to carve out some time, this library might get us a fully integrated physics engine for robot modeling with just a week or two of dedicated work.

Any physics and Java nerds want to try to do something awesome? It should be possible to implement this entirely with scripts, no editing the BowlerStudio source.

I also noticed it can run the simulation MUCH faster than real-time. I have to add a pretty serious delay to make it run a loop as slow as the simulation is sampling. I think that means doing predictive balance catching is a real possibility. As in, in this configuration, will it tip over?

This is a key piece for a robotics development platform, and i am excited to see what this makes possible.

I re-wrote the first few tutorial steps that a user sees. The first few concepts relate to how the scripts run and talk to each other. Then you get introduced to devices, then some of the supporting libraries such as cad, physics and audio playback.

http://neuronrobotics.com/BowlerStudio/Welcome-To-BowlerStudio/

I added the Java Media Framework to the kernel and Bowler Studio. I needed this for a script that saved a collection of images to a video file (for a security camera at our makerspace). This will also be useful for collecting sample and log data of a running robot. These log videos can also be fed back in as testing data, although i will need to add a video file image provider.

I have *finally* retrieved my mac from the box it was packed in during the move of our makerspace. Having gotten a chance to do some testing and debugging, i have finally fixed the .app for Mac OS 10.7+. I have tested it on El Capitan and the .app can e used to load BowlerStudio. You need to hold <ctrl> when clicking it because i dont yet have an apple developer ID and its unsigned.

So i have added a new sub-system that combines the git loading and the JSON parser to load, modify and publish sets of measurements that correspond to specific parts in the real world. I have servos, steppers, bearing belts nuts and it all was compiled by Steve Kelly for a totally different programmatic cad package. Because it was isolated well, i was able to load in directly and start using the parts.

here is an example of the syntax https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/033482ccab38baa08d9e84bf224e7823

this should be availible in the 0.15.7 release.

I added to the menues for github a set of crawlers that will show you all of your projects., watched, and personal repositories. It will clone them to the disk, then show you any files BowlerStudio cna run (based on file extention). I also added special loaders for JSON and STL files so you can load them out of the menue. I also added a feature where you cna define a new scripting langauge on the fly, but thats more of a incedental to the rest of the updates.

This release now integrates the physics engine throughout the system. Creatures can launch a physics simulation, and step through it. Icons are also featured, and are side-loaded from a git repo. At the time of release the icons are blank, but that will change over time. Send PR's to https://github.com/madhephaestus/BowlerStudioImageAssets for Icon suggestions! If you fork the repo and push your icons, BowlerStudio is smart enough to look at your icons and load them, so you can change icons and see the changes without having to recompile BowlerStudio, you can do this right from the release binary version.

I have re-worked the user-interface layout system to load the FXML files using the side-load from git model i used to load the images. This should mean that the UI starts getting better much faster than before.