Telepresence Robot Proves It’s A Small World After All

March 27, 2014 by Adam Fabio 18 Comments

jolvoy [Chris] works as part of a small team of developers in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the US. [Timo], one of their core members, works remotely from Heidelberg, Germany. In order to make [Timo] feel closer to the rest of the group, they built him a telepresence robot.

It was a link to DoubleRobotics that got the creative juices flowing. [Chris] and his team wanted to bring [Timo] into the room, but they didn’t have a spare $2499 USD in their budget. Instead they mated a standard motorized pan/tilt camera base with an RFduino Bluetooth kit. An application running on [Timo’s] phone sends gyroscope status through the internet to the iPad on the robot. The robot’s iPad then sends that data via Bluetooth to the RFduino. The RFduino commands pan and tilt movements corresponding with those sensed by the gyroscope. A video chat application runs on top of all this, allowing [Timo] to look around the room and converse with his coworkers.

All the source code is available via GitHub. The design didn’t work perfectly at first. [Chris] mentions the RFduino’s Bluetooth API is rather flaky when it comes to pairing operations. In the end the team was able to complete the robot and present it to [Timo] as a Valentine’s Day gift. For [Chris’] sake we hope [Timo] doesn’t spend too much of his time doing what his homepage URL would suggest: “screamingatmyscreen.com”

[Thanks Parker]

Hackaday 68k: So You Want A Kit?

March 27, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 67 Comments

68000

It’s yet another update to the Hackaday 68k, the wire-wrapped backplane computer that will eventually be serving up our retro site.

This is also a demo of Hackaday Projects, our new, fancy online documentation tool for all your adventures in making and tinkering. Did you know we’re having a contest on Hackaday Projects? Make something sci-fi, and you’re in the running for some really good prizes. There’s soldering stations, o-scopes, and a lot of other prizes being thrown at the winners. It’s awesome. First one to build a working Mr. Fusion wins.

In this update, I’m going to go over the beginnings of the video board, why Hammond enclosures are awesome and terrible at the same time, and some thoughts on turning this into a kit or product of some type. Click that, ‘Read more…’ link.

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3 DOF Open Source Robot Arm Is Just The Beginning

March 27, 2014 by James Hobson 11 Comments

Arm3-v1

[Dan Royer] of Marginally Clever had a dream. A dream to build an open-source 6 DOF robot that anyone can make! To do so, he’s been learning robotics for the past two years, and has just finished the first step — he’s designed and built an open source 3 DOF palletizing robot!

He’s based this little guy off of the commercial ABB 460 palletizing robot, which is a tried and true industrial robot. It features all laser cut parts, a few nuts and bolts, some stepper motors and an Arduino UNO for the brain. He’s released all of the design files on Thingiverse and the firmware on GitHub — yet another project we’d like to build if only we had a laser cutter!

And don’t worry, the Arduino UNO is only being used for this first prototype — he’s already started writing code for the RUMBA (Reprap Universal Mega Board with Allegro-driver) controller for revision 2.

Stick around to see it write its first greeting with a marker — Hello World!

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Building A Network Controllable RGB LED Lamp From An Old Scanner

March 26, 2014 by Nick Conn 13 Comments

EthernetLamp

Being able to use one of your old projects to make a new one better can be quite satisfying. [Steve] from Hackshed did just this: he integrated an Arduino based webserver into a new network controllable RGB lamp.

What makes this lamp unique is that the RGB LED bar comes from an old Epson scanner. Recycling leftover parts from old projects or derelict electronics is truly the hacker way. After determining the pinout and correct voltage to run the LEDs at, the fun began. With the LED bar working correctly, the next step was to integrate an Arduino based webserver. Using an SD card to host the website and an Ethernet Arduino shield, the LEDs become network controllable. Without missing a beat, [Steve] integrated a Javascript based color picker that supports multiple web browsers. This allows the interface to look quite professional. Be sure to watch the lamp in action after the break!

The overall result is an amazing color changing lamp that works perfectly. All that is left to do is create a case for it, or integrate it into an existing lamp. This is a great way to use an LED strip that would have otherwise gone to waste. If you can’t find a scanner with a color wand like this one, you can always start with an RGB strip.

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Electric Scooter MK 1 — Tundra Upgrade!

March 26, 2014 by James Hobson 10 Comments

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After discovering his all-terrain snow scooter was terrible on ice — [Dane] decided he needed to do some upgrades.

In case you don’t remember, we first shared [Dane’s] project back in December, where he zipped around city streets covered in snow. The scooter used a big knobby tire and a front ski to slide around on. To make it suitable for ice, he had to redesign it a bit to handle slippery surfaces; he needed to give it skates.

He had originally hoped to find figure skates at a thrift store (where he originally found the classic scooter), but had no luck — so he made his own. Some 1/2″ x 1/4″ steel bar later, a bit of welding, and he had a rather rugged front skate to work with!

After he was content with his upgraded front-end, he started adding studs to the back tire. He’s using plain old 3/8″ self tapping screws, and a whole lot of epoxy to make sure they stay in.

So does it work? Oh yeah.

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Piezos For Haptic Feedback

March 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 4 Comments

Haptic

The most common way to put some sort of haptic feedback in an interface hasn’t changed much since the plug-in rumble pack for the Nintendo 64 controller – just put a pager motor in there and set it spinning when the user needs to feel something. This method takes a relatively long time to spin up, and even the very cool Steam controller with voice coiled directional pads can’t ‘stick’, or stay high or low to notify the user of something.

[Tim]’s day job is working with very fancy piezoelectric actuators, and when an opportunity came up to visit the Haptics symposium, he jumped at the chance to turn these actuators into some sort of interface. He ended up creating two devices: a two-piezo cellphone-sized device, and a mouse with a left click button that raises and lowers in response to the color of the mousepad.

The cellphone device contains two piezo actuators with a 10 gram weight epoxied on. A small microcontroller and piezo driver give this pseudo phone the smoothest vibrations functions you can imagine. The much more innovative color-sensing mouse has a single actuator glued to the left button, and a photosensor in the base. When the mouse rolls over a dark square on a piece of paper, the button raises. Rolling over a lighter area, the button lowers. It’s all very, very cool tech and something we’ll probably see from Apple, Microsoft, or Sony in a few years.

Videos of both devices below.

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WS2812b Ambilight Clone For The Raspi

March 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 28 Comments

For how often the Raspberry Pi is used as a media server, and how easy it is to connect a bunch of LEDs to the GPIO pins on the Pi, we’re surprised we haven’t seen something like Hyperion before. It uses the extremely common WS2812b individually controllable RGB LEDs to surround the wall behind your TV with the colors on the edges of the screen.

One of the big features of Hyperion is the huge number of LEDs it’s able to control; a 50 LED strip only eats up about 1.5% of the Pi’s CPU. It does this with a “Mini UART” implemented on the Pi running at 2MHz.

There’s only one additional component needed to run a gigantic strip of RGB LEDs with a Pi – an inverter of some sort made with an HCT-series logic chip. After that, you’ll only need to connect the power and enjoy a blinding display behind your TV or monitor.

Thanks [emuboy] for sending this one in.