[eclipsed78], built an automatic toroid winder. The drum splits in order to load the toroid. Then wire is wound on the drum, much like any other coil would be wound. The drum rotates as a slider pulls the wire off the drum, while revolving in and out of the toroid. A side tension keeps the slack out of the wire during operation. The winding coil is stepped as the drum rotates, in order to control the turns ratio. [eclipsed78] created a stepper driver from a schematic, so he could drive the motors. You can watch the winder in operation as a series of videos. The first of which is embedded below. If you have ever needed to wind a massive toroidal transformer, this is the project for you. Read the rest of this entry »
[ross], a reader is working on a CD changing and ripping robot. The arm picks up a CD and the platform then rotates, stopping in front of the tray to drop the CD. A JB welded tire pump provides the vacuum pick up, while a brake light acts as a resistor to trick a PC power supply into operation. A Motor Shield beefs up an Arduino in order to drive the servos.
[sprite_tm], whose projects we have covered in the past, took the popular bristlebot to an extreme and created a controllable version. A bristlebot consists of a small vibrating motor mounted with a battery on the head of a toothbrush. These micro-robots buzz around randomly, and he attempted to tame them. He used a platform of twin bristlebots and added an optical sensor from a laser mouse and an ATtiny13. The optical sensor is used to determine the relative motion of the robot, so that the motors can be adjusted accordingly. He also has a video of the bot using the sensor to find a mark on the floor and stay within bounds. Although it isn’t as accurate, it acts like a traditional line-following robot.
Those of you who have played with a Pleo know exactly where this is going. The Pleo averages about 30 minues per 2-3 hour charge. Just swap batteries you say? Nope, the battery packs aren’t available. Fortunately, you can make your own pretty easily. The basic frame is a standard battery pack for 6 AA’s. There are only a few modifications necessary to line up the leads and make it fit once you’ve loaded it with batteries.
We all want our very own personal bagpiper. Playing it ourselves is too much effort, and keeping a full time bagpiper around can be a pain. You have to feed them, clothe them, give them union breaks, etc. Luckily, modern technology has come to the rescue again. You can have your very own robot bagpiper. McBlare plays the bagpipe with technical proficiency that would be impossible for most humans. But lets hear it put some soul into it.
[Scott] runs gamesbyemail.com. One of his biggest hurdles was producing real random numbers for the games. He had tried various methods like math.random and random.org, but kept getting complaints about the quality of the random numbers. His solution was to build an automatic dice roller. His initial attempts were made from Legos and were never quite reliable enough to be put into the system. The Dice-O-Matic however has proven to be a random number generating monster. It is 7 feet tall and capable of 1.3 million dice rolls per day. Wow.
After making a few units for the new Discovery t.v. show called Weaponizers, [Jeremy] decided to release this video showing how to modify a golf cart for radio control. The radio and controller are basic off the shelf R/C gear, running some linear actuators.
[thanks Divide]
At Berkeley, they’re coming up with new ways to make their itty bitty hexapods. These are basically tiny flatpacked bodies cut from cardboard. The end goal is to not only make them smaller and faster to build, but to reduce the friction in the joints. You can download the files on their site as well as download movies of them in action. For a larger and somewhat less complicated flatpacked robot, check out the flatpacked 2 motor walker.
[Daniel] sent in this project. He tells us it’s an Arduino powered kid’s toy that “furiously swings his arms” when you squeeze his chest. As you can see in the video on the site, furious is up for interpretation. It is a sloth though, maybe that’s sloth furious. While it is cute and we do applaud the effort, anyone with children will agree that this is a step down in destruction for a 3 year old. You’re going to have to spice it up a bit, or give it a timer and make it free standing, make it roar or something to make it more appealing. What recommendations do you guys have to improve this toy?
Lara, the robot pictured above, is the first humanoid robot to pass security and have her own seat on a plane. The reason she had to travel via airline was that FedEx had lost and damaged her on previous trips. On the way back from Robofest, which she placed 5th in, security didn’t really want to let her on the plane. They’re lucky they didn’t all get detained. Fortunately, Robofest made the news and one guard had seen it. They call Lara autonomous, but state that she can only move her limbs based on commands. Their reason for calling her autonomous is that she doesn’t need to be tethered to a computer to do this. Does that really qualify as autonomy?
The Irregular Incurve is a robotic instrument built by [Xiaoyang Feng] as part of his ITP thesis work. It’s a MIDI instrument with an array of 12 strung bows mounted to a curved shower rod. The end of each bow has a tuning key. The strings are each picked using independently mounted arms. One servo controls the downward motion of the pick while the other controls the rotation of the shaft. A damper is also attached to each arm. The string vibrations are transferred to a spruce soundbox under the bridge. Below you can see a video of Gizmodo playing with it at the ITP show. Check out [Xiaoyang]’s Flickr set for images of the build process plus some early videos of the mechanism.
Here’s a pretty cool project done with the Lego NXT system. It’s a robot that will draw you a picture. Yes, we know it could be done cnc style, but this is much more fun. You load a picture into the software, adjust the levels so the software can create the vector version more easily, then let it rip. Now they need to add face recognition.
This contraption was made in the late 80’s, expressly for shearing sheep. For some reason, it never really took off. We’re guessing because it takes forever and still requires a person to wrangle the sheep on to the holding rack. Having that person just shear the sheep themselves might be much quicker. We think they need to refine it a bit. It should be fast, and not require a person to load it. Maybe something like a modified version of this.
