Printable gripping rover is wristwatch controlled
posted Mar 29th 2011 10:47am by Mike Szczysfiled under: robots hacks
[Lars Kristian Roland] is using a wristwatch to control this rover. The bot itself is a utilitarian build with a gripper based on this Thingiverse project. As you can see in the video after the break, it’s got variable speed control based on accelerometer data from a TI ez430 Chronos wristwatch.
The watch connects to the bot wirelessly thanks to a CC1110 development board which relays communications to the on-board Arduino through a serial connection. It looks like it’s a bit of a bother to make slow and precise movements using this setup, but this can probably be changed by tweaking how accelerometer values are interpreted (using a non-linear equation would allow you more control at low speeds without sacrificing top speed for the motors).
Because this is using the same RF hardware that the IM-ME does, we can’t help but wonder if the CC1110 development board could be swapped out for an unused IM-ME dongle?
[Thanks Hugo]
The tilt control is neat but it seems really hard to control. Throw on one of these:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9032
And I bet you would see a huge increase in controllability.
Really cool use of reprap/makerbot/RP. Love to see people prototyping useful things