DyIO (Dynamic Input Output) controller

The DyIO hardware is basically a dead project now, but the firmware from the DyIO lives on! I have re-tooled the firmware to be an Arduino library (for chips with >4k ram). If you search for BowlerCom in the Arduino library manager, you should see it there (no special download/install necessary). Once you added the library, you can run the DyIOLargeChip example on your Teensy 3.2 (my current fave hardware) and it will boot up as a DyIO. All code that used to talk to DyIO's now can talk to a Teensy 3.2 with the DyIO firmware!

Hey everyone, we just got featured on Product Hunt, so if you think our project is cool, please upvoat on there so lots of people get to see it? http://www.producthunt.com/tech/wifi-dyio-kickstarter

I taught a 3 day intensive class with these 2 kids to learn basic programming and robot control. THey said they wanted to build a talking Yoda, so that's what we built! It started with one of the legs from the Hexapod got its back-bone control. THis gave them the ability to place Yodas head in cartesian space using a game controller. they then recorded those locations and synced it up with the Text To Speech synthisys of each of his lines. Last they made a function that automatically ran his mouth based on what they had him say.

Here is the code that made it go: https://gist.github.com/madhephaestus/9ad31af45be2c1230da0

if you open that link in BowlerStudio, and a DyIO connected, yoda will start talking to you too!

I just posted a video of the PID controller in the DyIO. It lets you select an input and connect it to an output with a built in real-time controller that runs on the DyIO itself. This allows for closed-loop motor control, high speed reactions, or even a simple line-following robot (a special case where you can use PID to solve the problem). It has 8 independant channels, so you cna link 8 different inputs to thier respective output.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/neuronrobotics/wifi-dyio-robot-controller-w-24-channels

Our kickstarter for the WiFi version of the DyIo just went live !

We just uploaded the official BOM as an image in the images section. We will be breaking that out into the profile BOM soon, but posted it there just so there is a BOM posted right now.

I wanted to show off one more feature of the DyIO and BowlerStudio, an animation and playback engine for recording motions over an audio track, and playing them back in real time. This lets anyone make awesome halloween displays! You could even add the FaceTracking script to only jump out when someone gets reaaally close to it then.... BOOOM! jump out and scare!

I *tried* to show everything in 2 minutes, and got a fast overview of the features. Needless to say many hours of video could be generated for this. We are very excited to be entered into the Hack-A-Day Best product and HAD Prize quarterfinals.

Neuron Robotics Cooperative is a worker owned enterprise that designs and deploys robot controllers to make the process or building robots easy. While i understand that is a bold statement, we have built software based on top-tier research grade and medically certified robotics control platform, and added an easy to use and learn application interface, BowlerStudio.

To that end, the DyIO and BowlerStudio should be concidered as one project, seperated out here on Hackaday.io for the purpose of making each easier for members of the site to understand.

That said, we have already begun using this robotics design platform as a way to teach kids programming, and keep their attention from day one with robots! We use a Java based platform to teach programmatic CAD, and then attach that CAD to kinematics models and let the kids see each step of the way what they are creating. The Dyio takes that excitement out of the computer and brings to life the printed parts that the students generated. We see this platform solving the large air-gap in the learning process between introduction to the concept of programming and building robots, and the final satisfaction of having actually created a robot. By closing this gap it is easier to keep up the excitement for learning, and increasing student engagement.

Basically it makes learning fun again because robots are inherently engaging.

Here you can see the DyIO running the walking algorithm generated by BowlerStudio. The DyIO is performing the coordinated motion, and the computer is performing all the heavy compute math of the kinematics.