IGP:D2 - Sketch Dump

Just a sketch dump of some of the recent War Girl ideas and scribbles.

Cheers,
~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - Systems Report

So of course I've fallen behind in posts, because, well, life happened. Those of you visiting from the RPF, you're already caught up, but those of you who aren't, here's the latest developments!

The Iron Girl Project Directives

The IGP has been split into three directives, each with it's own project structure and priority level. This is mostly due to space constraints - I'm aiming to have all the design and engineering bits squared away before I move into a larger space to start manufacturing processes (mills, welders, and apartments don't get along).

IGP Directive 1 - Modular Exoskeleton Platform:

- This is just a fancy way of saying I'll be continuing the work on the interior exoskeleton and associated software/hardware. I will still be working on an interior skeleton compatible with as many types of foam and pep armor as I can, allowing for extensible I/O, HUD integration, and eventually power-assisted limbs. I'm rather fond of the idea that anybody will be able to 3D print/CNC/mill/cut out an interlocking skeleton, and with a bit of foam or risers, put it on under their armor and bring an extra level of realism to it. .STL and source files will be free, of course, and I'll probably put them up here/on GitHub/somewhere.
- ETA: It'll be a continually evolving project, but I'd like to get an upper-body prototype together by December/January, adding power assistance as funds permit. Here's some recent images of the right forearm in progress:

IGP Directive 2 - War Girl Mk 1:

- This is something I've been gnawing on for a while - an Iron Girl suit with weapons all over it, what's not to love? I've been making some Pep files of the War Machine Mk 1, just to get my eye in on pepping and also to have a model to draw on and sketch all over. I'll be using a tweaked Mk VII suit as a base, and the wonderful Darkside501st over on the RPF has been super awesome in letting me use his 3D files from his Mk VII. I'm making this strictly as costume armor, mostly as an excuse to make an exo with a bunch of weapons stuck on it. Here's some concept art as a teaser:

IGP Directive 3 - Iron Girl Mk 1:

- This is probably the most exciting of all (at least, to me). This is the long-term, "real steel" exoskeleton - I'll be doing what stress testing I can against blunt and sharp weapons, small-caliber firearms, heat, and extreme weather. Will it rival DARPA's XOS or TALOS suits? Probably not. But will it be built by one girl out of her garage/apartment? Yes, and that's kind of the point. Currently, it's strictly in the design phase - I'm collaborating with a few people on this, and I might throw up a thread about it on the RPF, if people are curious enough. Most of the news on this will be delivered right here though, once it gets rolling. I've gotten ahold of some mechanical simulation software to do stress and pressure analysis operations, and fabrication will involve some heavier-duty tools/machinery. But it's happening, and I'll release as many files I can as I go along.

Other Stuff!

- Some 3D models I have previously produced for this project are in the process of being converted/recreated in CAD format, for more precise manufacturing and simulation testing, so there may be some changes in design and appearance as this goes along.
- A new version of the HUD code (v0.5) will be out by the end of the year, but there will be a lot of changes to make the code more extensible and stable. So for those of you who have downloaded the code or made changes/additions, you might have to tweak them when the update is released.

Donations!

Also, I'm now accepting donations! I've been funding this escapade entirely with what I can take out of my paycheck, so if you'd like to help me afford some of the tools, components, and caffeine I'll need to get this done, please click the Donate link on the sidebar! I know everybody says this, but every little bit counts. Even a dollar gets me a few resistors and a Coke Zero.

I hope you're as excited as I am about the peoject, and more news is coming soon!

Cheers,
~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - HUD, Part 3

Part 3 of the HUD! Yay! This'll be a short update, as not much has changed except graphical improvements.

After the previous migration to Processing (with the hopeful RPi port), and a few tinkers with .OBJ files for the horizon, I decided to stick to Processing-based assets as much as possible, and only importing images where needed (because drawing outlines by vectors is sometimes stupid. The end results/evolution is shown below.

And the current state:

Data still comes in over the I2C bus from the 10-DOF sensor, but I've added in a few more functional variables, like the Repulsor charge indicators (with moving bar graphs), system uptime, and the compass indicator up top. CPU usage is low with this rig so far, so as long as I don't introduce face-tracking, I should be okay to still run this setup on an RPi.

I'll be taking a bit of a break from the HUD to focus on the underskeleton 3D models, so I can actually start nailing tech to my body.

Oh, and other exciting news! The code for the Mk 0.4 version of the IGP will be up on GitHub within the next few days. This will include the Processing and Arduino sketches I'm using. I'm under the name Lexikitty (what else?) and the repository will be Iron_Girl_Mk_0.4.

Go have an awesome day, and build something neat!
~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - HUD, Part 2

So here's a few updates on the HUD and AHRS (Altitude Heading and Reference System).

I recently got an Adafruit 10-DOF IMU to handle all the head tracking and movement data for the "horizon lock" effect seen in the IM Mark II display. Combining this with the sample code and a few modifications, I managed to get something along the lines of this:

Which doesn't look too shabby at all, at least for a proof-of-concept. After fiddling about with calibration settings and how to display data on-screen in Processing (I'm still somewhat new to it), I managed to get a slightly more informative display up and running. I also added a "horizon lock", since the real Mk II showed that on it's maiden flight.



Still a long way from the original. But still, this is the work of just one girl (who has a full-time job and a girlfriend), and I'm still aiming to get as many of the systems seen int eh IM movies (particularly the initial Mark II test sequence, below) as functional as realistically possible.



It remains to be seen how much of this will be able to carry over to the RPi - if I can at least get the OBJ loader to work, I may be able to simply black out everything else and "fake" keyframing with the opacity switch. Remains to be seen. For now, though, I'm off to model a real HUD model, since that last one was crappy alpha at best.

Cheers,
~Lexikitty

The Distractables - Paracord Bracelet

I took a bit of a break from the Iron Girl project to sort through some boring technical work that needed to be done, and I haven't found the energy to jump into it quite yet. So I made a small paracord bracelet with a metal shackle, because why not. And I thought I might as well share it with y'all. :)

Now go make something! I'm going to sneak a few levels of Doom 3 in before I finally settle down to some more designing.

~Lexikitty

Now Playing: Space Engineers

I tend to be one of the more distractable folks out there. So, while waiting for my next paycheck so that I could order more parts, I got distracted for a bit by a new game I got recently. It goes by the name of Space Engineers, and if you enjoy creation/space games and don't know about it already, you SHOULD, and here's why.

All of my expectations for space-based games are unfairly based upon two things: the TV series Firefly and Microsoft's game Freelancer. Everything in a space game should satisfy either the feeling of flying around the 'verse smuggling stuff and just barely making a living on the outer rims, or should fall somewhere in the incredibly open-ended structured playground of Freelancer, where you are, quite literally, building your own life around your little polygon pilot. Space Engineers, even in it's early alpha stages, does both.

Not only can you really, truly build your own ship, but there's everything from mining to (potential) combat. Ships can have guns and missile launchers, individual astronauts can carry assault rifles, even thrusters can do a decent amount of damage by melting steel plates on ships and stations. Creative mode allows you to build unfettered, making gargantuan pieces of blocky technical delight. But my favorite so far has to be Survival mode, where you start with a certain scenario and have to actually weld, grind, drill, and mine yourself enough supplies to build stuff.

I started with the "crashed ship" scenario, in which you're the only survivor of a large ship that's crashed into an asteroid. You then have to build yourself a home out of parts from the wreckage, and get yourself back on your feet.

I also enabled Cargo Ships, in which random derelict ships will float through your sector at a distance. You can attempt to catch them, but it's not entirely risk-free. Not only do you have to build a ship to go out there and actually catch the derelicts, but you can also very easily bang it to pieces trying to grab onto salvage, and end up floating thousands of kilometers away from home.

After a fantastic few hours, I managed to create a cozy little home on the opposite side of the asteroid from the crash site.

Resources are acquired by grinding or drilling; construction is done by welding. All power tools and movement use suit energy, which must be recharged in a working ship's cockpit or at a medical bay. Power can travel through any type of block, and is provided by reactors, which use uranium ingots. Reactors do use up fuel, and if it's gone, there's no power to your entire structure.

They've recently added working turrets, collectors and emitters for inventory transfer, and a bunch more (wheels!) with some new updates I haven't tried out yet. It still has a few bugs to work out, but I'd highly recommend it. It's available on Steam here.

Play on,

~Lexikitty

Please give a warm welcome...

...to the newest tool in my arsenal shop, the Printrbot Simple Metal. She arrived in considerably more pieces than she is in now, since I got a kit. Since I was listening to Still Untitled for most of the build and I knoll constantly, I decided to knoll all the tools I used in the build in front of the finished printer in Adam's honor.

A few notes about the kit, if any of you are considering it:

• The pieces are extremely solid. The entire thing is made up of very quality parts that will definitely last a good long time.
• The photo-based instructions are vagueish and not really all that helpful. In fact, if you only follow the instructions given, the hot end never actually gets installed - you have to figure it out for yourself that it might be important, being the BUSINESS END OF THE PRINTER AND ALL.
• While they've cut a lot less corners than with the Simple wooden version, the belts are sill secured with zip ties, and I've had at least one issue with it so far from printing with it for two days.
• If this is your first 3D printer, I'd recommend you read up a bit on GCode and Slic3r before ordering even the fully assembled version. I got through it okay, but I'm pretty familiar with microcontrollers and that helped as far as understanding what the heck they were asking you to do during initial setup.
• It's fiddly. I had to rebuild the Z axis assembly twice before it ran smoothly. The extruder jammed once, and the X axis lost tension when running their provided GCode for a fan shroud because the X axis slammed into the frame and pulled the zip tie off the belt. A MakerBot it is not, but it's also not 2K$.

Below are some random shots of the build in progress, followed by the obligatory "it works!" video printing a heart-shaped pencil grip I spent all of 30 seconds on (Art it isn't, but it worked as a good SketchUp to print test). I'll play around with maybe printing some of my Cinema 4D models later, once I have stable printing. I'll probably also post my print settings in another post once I've had a chance to play around with it and get it just right.

And here, you can watch it merrily singing to itself:



Now go build something awesome!

~Lexikitty

New Parts!

New parts arrived! Some of these were just restocking runs (headers, DC jack switches) but something really awesome is also in the mix - a 10-DOF IMU for the HUD AHRS system (you can see it in the bottom right corner). I also got some cheap tilt sensors, with the hope that they may be useful in repulsor warm-up/down sequences. The idea is to use two in series (it's just a ball that closes the connection, as far as I can tell) so that the repulsor warms up ONLY when my arm is fully extended (by setting them at a specific angle).

~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - HUD, Part 1

When I was looking into the Iron Girl project, the most intriguing - and scary - part by far was the HUD. The HUD on the Mark II is magnificent, and it only gets better with each suit in the movie series. If we skip the holographic and multi-layer effects (again, tech not financially feasible), we’re left with the concept alone:

A video feed from the outside world, as well as:
Numerical and sensory data about the suit
Corresponding visual references to video feed images (heading, bearing, horizon line)
So originally, I wanted to use some sort of USB webcam > OpenCV (computer vision application), and have the Pi do all the processing. Turns out both of the webcams I had lying around had issues with the Pi - one needed additional power, and the other gave me about 4FPS tops (without any image processing). So I ordered the standalone Raspberry Pi camera board, hoping that would have a better framerate. It definitely did, but the issue there was that it injects video directly to the framebuffer - meaning that the operating system/Python/X has no way of knowing what the heck the camera is seeing. The camera feed just fills the entire screen right over whatever it was that you were doing. Rude, but useful in some circumstances.

Using the raspivid command-line arguments, you can specify x and y coordinates for where you want the video. In doing this, you can kind of fake an X window at specific coordinates or use a non-resizable GUI to get the effect. However, the mouse pointer will always disappear behind this, and for the HUD purposes it didn’t make sense to shrink the video to the center of the screen to display edge-HUD elements.

There is, however, a raspivid command-line option labeled -op for “opacity”. This gives you a range of transparency (0-255) on the video itself, so you can actually have highly visible elements BEHIND the video feed and they’ll show up okay. Color mixing is a bit off, and it’s not the prettiest solution, but short of delving deep into OpenGL and MMAL just for the sake of this one project, it was good enough for me.

Booting into Wheezy, I pulled up a sample HUD image in the picture viewer, made it full-screen and zoomed in till I got the edges to touch the screen. I then started raspivid and played for a while with the command-line. At an opacity level of about 110, I managed to get something reasonable:

So that worked okay, and decently for my proof-of concept. I ended up adjusting the settings a bit since I would be working with a pair of video glasses on the composite output of the Pi, not the HDMI port with a nice monitor. The glasses only have a resolution of 720x480. The specific ones I used were based off the Olympus Eye-Trek FMD-150W, but actually removed from an old Enhanced Visions JORDY unit that had cracked on the side and lost both earpiece hinges:

I switched the output to composite on the RPI and had to adjust the contrast settings and brightness to make it look anywhere near decent, but I manged to get something workable with my test HUD image and the video feed overlay:

So far, so good.

For anybody looking for cheapish HMD’s, the JORDY might not be an entirely bad option. Just make sure you look for a version 2 if you need widescreen. The version 1 has a black cord linking the controller unit and the glasses, and has a notch between the eyepieces (right above the nosepiece). The version 2 has a clear/braided cord and no notch above the nose piece. The only real difference is the resolution of the internal screens - the version 1 is based off the FMD-150 and has a resolution of 640x480 (to the best I can tell). The V2 is the FMD-150W with the 720x480 resolution. I manged to find a V1 for about 60 bucks on eBay at the time of this writing. Adafruit.com also has 320x240 HMD’s for $109, and you won’t have to do any salvage.

For the rest of the overlay, I decided to use Pygame to load all the data off the I2C bus, but that’s for another post.

Cheers for now,

~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - Repulsors, Part 2

For the second part of the repulsor project, I wanted to get data fed back to the main computer while also fading the repulsors in a reasonable likeness to the actual repulsor firing pattern from the movie. So, after playing around with the Trinket, I eventually came up with something like this.



The Thinket fades a 1W LED through a MOSFET in conjunction with the NeoPixel Ring. Here’s my first attempt at getting the audio to work. In this example, the Trinket fires directly and then notifies the RPI via I2C that it’s been fired, and Python plays the pre-loaded sound. This method ended up being scrapped since the delay from the I2C check was too long, and I instead made the Raspberry Pi issue the I2C command to fire the Trinket (which made everything virtually instant).



Below is the Trinket wiring diagram. It’s slightly inaccurate - I’m using a Small Mint Tin Perma-Proto from Adafruit, but they don’t have that in their Fritzing library.

A few notes:

- The center LED is a 1W BL-HP20A Cool White LED. It tops at at 3.8V, but if you use NiMH batteries, it seems to be okay.
- The switchable AA battery pack will feed both repulsors and be mounted on my back. It’s got rechargeable AA’s to make sure the LED doesn’t get too much voltage. I may play around with the center LED power later on, but it works for now.
- The MOSFET I’m currently using (IRF510) is a 10V MOSFET and consequently requires a higher gate voltage than a piddly HIGH on 3.3v. Thus, the center light is a bit dim, but it works. I’m still looking for a suitable choice, and will update in a later post with what I’ve found.
- This also leaves me with one I/O pin, which I may or may not use for a tilt sensor (power-up, power-down)or some other physical sensor to feed back to the main computer.

Next steps? Mount the PCB on a glove-like structure, and figure out proper cable routing up the arm. I'm also alternating working on this with working on the HUD.

Cheers for now,

~Lexikitty

The Iron Girl Project - Repulsors, Part 1

The repulsor units are obvious necessities for any Iron Man-themed cosplay, costume, or suit. This was one of those situation where, even though the tech doesn’t technically exist, I still had to incorporate the component into the design. To make up for the lack of actual functionality, I decided I required two things from it:

The light coming out of the palm would have to be substantially bright (“enough to blind a camera momentarily” became my benchmark)
The repulsor would have to let me know it successfully fired, and I could relay that data back up to the HUD.
To satisfy all this, I ended up using the Adafruit Trinket. Not only did it come in a native 3.3v variant, but it supported I2C (via the TinyWire library) as well as the NeoPixel library, which was of interest.

For the light source, I used a 12-LED NeoPixel Ring in conjunction with a BL-HP20A 1W LED. The LED, when mounted on the heatsink, just fit inside the NeoPixel Ring. I got some test code onto the Trinket and the end result was this:

Which I thought didn’t look half bad. But it still didn’t flash or do anything all that exciting. Which is what I made Part 2 is for!

See you after the jump,

~Lexikitty

Iron Girl Project - Concept

The Iron Girl concept was simple. Build a functional Iron Man-like suit, omitting technologies that:

- don’t exist yet
- weren’t financially feasible or reasonable*
- required special licensing/storage/care (there won’t be tank missiles)

The original Iron Girl framework design was garbage and I’m not posting it. However, below is the most complete sketch I have of the current framework (though it is constantly evolving).

I’ll explain all systems in their own detailed posts, but for now, here’s the system overview:

The HUD is (for now) an HMD from my scrap pile running on a composite RCA connection. I’m overlaying a raspivid feed onto a Pygame user interface.

The system relies heavily on the I2C bus to get data moved around. Repulsor firing is also controlled by the I2C bus (a decision I really didn’t want to do, but ended up having too - see Repulsor notes), and the Raspberry Pi is right in the center of it all.Most of the I2C slaves are 3.3v Adafruit Trinkets, with the exception of a 16-channel servo controller.

Firing is controlled using buttons hidden along the left side of the right-hand index finger, accessed by the thumb. The repulsor arms are “warmed up” by their position - I’m still testing whether a flex sensor or a tilt sensor is better for this.

Now to rummage through my notes to make decent explanations of the individual subsystems.

Cheers,

~Lexikitty

*Even though this is one of my biggest dreams ever, it is still, at best, a weekend warrior project. Thus the amount of resources I can justifiably pour into it is limited - however, I’m kind of glad of that - it’s forced me to be more creative than usual with what I have. In the future, I might implement some sort of donation system if people want to actually give money to make this better, but for now, I’ll keep everything on my court in case I muck it up.

The Iron Girl Project - History

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away….no, wait, that’s a different story.

Once upon a time, I saw the movie Iron Man (2008). I’d never been a huge comic book girl (working on it), and I wouldn’t have known Marvel from direct current. All I knew was that I needed to build a suit like that. Desperately.

So I started researching how much of it could be an actual possibility. I’d had some experience with robotics and code, so I figured that would help. But I ran into a brick wall at actually fabricating parts. I lived in a college dorm at the time, and I already was getting away with soldering and drilling - I wasn’t about to push my luck doing castings or metalworking. So I closed the books on it for a while, and put it on the shelf.

I built another robot, some computers, and started gradually acquiring parts for a workshop. I got my hands on a drill press last year, and did some basic metalworking. Found it wasn’t quite for me, but I could at least do it in a pinch if I needed to. I started getting out the Iron Man suit notes again and riffling through them.

And then the Raspberry Pi came out.

At first I didn’t much care about it - I investigated the GPIO pins on it, and realized everything was 3.3v, and to top it off, there were no Analog pins. I scoffed and went back to tinkering on my Arduino.

It was a week or so later when I was trying to run two pieces of servo code simultaneously when I realized how limited the Arduino was. I’d been tinkering with the idea of a War Machine turret-thingy, but had no clear idea of what I wanted it to do. However, I ran into the limitations of processing rather quickly. So I took my Raspberry Pi back out and started (grudgingly) to figure out the GPIO side of it. Thanks to Adafruit’s amazing Learning System pages, I got analog data from an Arduino fed into the Raspberry Pi, and even got Python to react to it. I was hooked.

From there, things got sort of intense. Within a few weeks I had I2C up and working, and a repulsor palm being run by a Trinket controlled by Python, which would also handle sound effects. The next week, I had a Raspberry Pi camera module, and by the time Sunday rolled around, I had a vague HUD working. And here we are.

So now you’ve had your boring history lesson. Go do something awesome and exciting.

~Lexikitty

Welcome!

Hi there!

So I needed a place to dump posts of my projects and personal work, and my Facebook feed just wasn't the place. After finding Tumblr to be a bit inept, I've moved on to Blogger. It should be noted that while I'm a techie, I don't hold a ton of interest in web design or blogging. So this won't be fancy. Hope you enjoy!

Cheers,
~Lexikitty