Day: June 18, 2013

Brushless Gimbal 3D Printed And Bolted To Quadcopter

June 18, 2013 by 37 Comments

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A handful of 3D printed parts, some brushless motors, and a bit of control hardware add a flair of cinematography to this quadcopter.

[Sean] sent in a tip about his work after seeing yesterday’s feature of a brushless gimbal being used to improve image stability with a shoulder mounted camera. That rig was designed to be used with a quadcopter, and this hacks shows why. It’s obvious from the demo footage that the gimbal — which is mounted directly to the frame of the TBS Discovery quadcopter — does a great job of keeping the image steady. The panning and tilting in directions contrary to the physics of flight make for a much more interesting video experience. Watch the inset video which is a live feed from the aircraft to the pilot. As the quadcopter makes very sharp banking turns you wouldn’t even be able to tell the pitch or roll have changed in the HQ version.

You can see a pair of images detailing the 3D printed parts and the assembled gimbal below.

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Best Robot Demos From ICRA 2013

June 18, 2013 by 17 Comments

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The 2013 IEEE International Conference of Robotics and Automation was held early in May. Here’s a video montage of several robots shown off at the event. Looks like it would have been a blast to attend, but at least you can draw some inspiration from such a wide range of examples.

We grabbed a half-dozen screenshots that caught our eye. Moving from the top left in clockwise fashion we have a segmented worm bot that uses rollers for locomotion. There’s an interesting game of catch going on in the lobby with this sphere-footed self balancer. Who would have thought about using wire beaters as wheels? Probably the team that developed the tripod in the upper right. Just below there’s one of the many flying entries, a robot with what looks like a pair of propellers at its center. The rover in the middle is showing off the 3D topography map it creates to find its way. And finally, someone set up a pool of water for this snake to swim around in.

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RedBull Creation 2013: Final Thoughts And Recap

June 18, 2013 by 3 Comments

I have arrived home safely, and I’ll spare you the long and boring story of how horribly my airline experiences were, both directions. The contest was delightful. Not only did I get to watch the teams compete, I got to meet people that I’ve wanted to meet for a long time.  The judges and shop monitors were a delight to talk with and work with. There are some great daily recap videos on the creation website, but I can’t embed them.

You’re probably wondering who won. Well, that was announced after I left. The public hadn’t even begun to vote on people’s choice (we weren’t even finished building the sign with the voting buttons!).

The judges were from all different areas of expertise. We had a form to fill out for each project that had several different values. There was functionality, aesthetics, resourcefulness, and some other stuff I can’t remember right now. [Greg] put together the criteria and I think he did a fantastic job at making the judging fair and balanced.

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Pager Message Sniffing With RPi And SDR

June 18, 2013 by 34 Comments

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The 1990’s called, they want you to use modern technology to listen in on your friends’ pager messages. Seriously, how many people are still using pagers these days? We guess you can find out by building your own Software-Define Radio pager message decoder.

[Sonny_Jim] bought an RTL2832 based USB dongle to listen in on ADS-B airplane communications only to find out the hardware wasn’t capable of communicating in that bandwidth range. So he set out to find a project the hardware was suited for and ended up exploring the POCSAG protocol used by paging devices. It turns out it’s not just used for person-to-person communications. There are still many automated systems that use the technology.

Setting things up is not all that hard. Reading the comments on the project log show some folks are having dependency issues, but these sound rather banal and will be a good chance for you to brush up on your Linux-fu. Once all the packages are installed you’re simply working with text which can be displayed in a myriad of ways. [Sonny] set up a text files on the Pi’s webserver so that he can check out the latest captures from a smartphone.

[Image Source]

[Frank] Builds A Chair From A Sequoia

June 18, 2013 by 1 Comment

chair[Frank Howarth] is a very competent woodworker known on the YouTubes for his wonderful stop-motion videos of turned wood bowls. Lately, though, he’s put some effort into building furniture, this time a beautiful lawn chair made from a gigantic sequoia log.

A few years ago, [Frank] and a friend acquired a gigantic sequoia log and milled it themselves with a chainsaw. After two summers, the huge boards were finally dry enough to be used and [Frank] decided a lawn chair would be a fine project.

The sides of the chair are a single monolithic piece of wood. Of course [Frank] needed to cut the sides in half and join them together again for the decorative holes, but it’s still an impressively solid piece of woodworking. The back and seat of the chair are also made out of the same sequoia board, cut into slats held together with three very large dowel rods.

This project probably wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the awesome equipment and tools [Frank] has in his shop. He has a great tour of his shop available for your viewing. We should all be so lucky.