3D Mouse Drives Robot Arm

July 28, 2015 by Al Williams 17 Comments

You’ve built the perfect robotic arm. How do you drive it? If you are [angrymop] you interface a 3D mouse from 3DConnexion via a few microcontroller boards. The Spacenavigator mouse is a staple anywhere professional CAD people are working, and it looks like it is a natural fit for a robot arm.

According to [angrymop], the Raspberry Pi can read the mouse’s commands via /dev/hidraw (that’s the raw human interface device). Each motion generates two lines of output. Each line has a unique identifying byte and values corresponding to the axis positions.

The Raspberry Pi then uses an SPI interface to talk to an ARM microcontroller and that drives the servos. The arm (the robot arm, not the processor) itself is well done, made from Lego Technic parts and common RC servos. Not that this is the most amazing thing we’ve ever seen built from Technic, but it is still pretty impressive.

You have to wonder if other 3D controllers might be useful for controlling robot arms or how the Spacenavigator would do controlling a bigger, more capable arm. Then again, maybe this arm would be the right size to build something inspired by Escher.

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Hackaday Prize Worldwide : New Delhi Kicad + Show And Tell

July 28, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 5 Comments

While Mumbai and Bengaluru have an active and large hacker community, New Delhi, India’s capital, seems to have leapfrogged ahead when it comes to hackerspaces – four at last count. So when the latest one in town, Maker’s Asylum, opened it’s doors last month, we decided to put together a hacker congregation to bring the community together and introduce them to the Hackaday Prize. Having already done Hackaday Prize bring-a-hack events in Mumbai and Bengaluru, we thought of doing something more substantial – a day long KiCad EDA workshop followed in the evening by a Show-n-Tell brag show.

Hackaday’s [Matt Berggren a.k.a. @technolomaniac] has done a couple of “Design a PCB from zero to WiFi with Hackaday!” Eagle EDA workshops recently. He designed a simple breakout board that allowed connecting an ESP-01 module to the USB port via an USB-UART cable with level conversion, pull up resistors and push button switches to make it easy to program. We had a slightly delayed start, so I quickly rushed through the awesome presentation that [Matt] has prepared, running through the “What is a PCB?” section and skipping the rest. We also discussed a couple of candidate designs for the day’s workshop – a pair of ATtiny line following robots, a simple Attiny SmartLED controller, but eventually, everyone got excited when I mentioned “ESP-8266” !