Printable Gripping Rover Is Wristwatch Controlled

March 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 4 Comments

[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?

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Portable Bench Supply Carries Around 10 Amp-hours Of Juice

March 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Punish3r] wanted to have power for prototyping on the go. What he came up with is this little thing above. Inside you’ll find common components that let the unit provide 10 amp hours of current with a 12V 500mA output.

The storage capacity is provided by a dozen Lithium batteries. These 3.7V cheapies are wired in parallel behind a protection board. For charging and discharging, a Sparkfun LiPo charger board was used, taking care of all the work necessary to top off the batteries using a wall-wort. The final piece in the puzzle is a boost converter that provides the regulated 12v connected to the red and black banana plug receivers on the bottom of the case.

This is very much a plug-and-play design… just make sure you hook the parts up correctly and you’re up and running. We would love to see a roll-your-own boost converter circuit that include a switch or dial that lets you select common PSU voltage levels. If you’re going to the trouble to make your own board you might as well incorporate the charging circuit at the same time.

[Thanks Paul]

PS3 Gun/controller Hybrid

March 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

[Luis] is very particular about his gaming controllers. He wanted to mod a Six Axis controller to fit into a Nerf gun body but there wasn’t really enough room for all of the components. After shopping around for a while he discovered a wired gun controller made by Namco which was developed for use with the game Time Crisis. He picked one up and went to work replacing the guts with a set pulled from a wireless controller.

The majority of the work on a mod like this one comes in extending the reach of each component. After cracking open the gun controller’s case, [Luis] begins preparing and soldering all twenty contact on the Six Axis controller PCB, then completing the connections necessary for each relocated component. This does make us wonder if there won’t be some element of noise introduced to the signals coming from the analog sticks? He mentions that one of them is ‘glitchy’ but that could be because he started with a used controller from eBay.

We took a couple of good tips out of this. Since the plastic housing is designed to hold each of the original PCBs securely, [Luis] reused them as a mounting surface for the replacement components. A little creative use of protoboard and some time in the paint shop and you’re done. Check out a video of the entire process, which also shares the finished results, after the break.

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Automated Home Beer Brewery — Best Laundry Room Add-on Ever

March 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 24 Comments

All-grain home brewing takes time… a lot of time. We’re not going to pretend like a good batch of beer isn’t thanks mostly to the artist that is the brewmaster, but at the same time it’s pretty amazing to see a compact system like the one above that can boil a batch of wort without much help from you.

[Zizzle] built this machine as his entry in the Renesas contest. You can see the development board there just to the left of the brew kettle. It’s network connected with a web interface that allows you to take recipes from Brewtarget and import them directly to the system. All you need to do is make sure that you load up the grain basket and boil addition modules to match your recipe. The bot takes it from there, filling the kettle, preheating that water, lowering the grains and maintaining temperature for the mash, and completing the boil with additions from the servo-controlled PVC pipe pods. Experienced brewers will notice a few steps missing, like the sparge, and a quick way to cool the finished wort. But this does take a huge part of the drudgery out of our hands. If only it had a clean-in-place system… then we’d really be happy! Don’t miss the video after the break and take a moment to check out the build-log posts.

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Your Robot Stand-in Has Arrived

March 28, 2011 by Mike Szczys 15 Comments

Meet TIPI, the Telepresence Interface by Pendulum Inversion. TIPI is something of a surrogate, giving physical presence to telecommuters by balancing an LCD screen and camera atop its six foot frame. The user has full control of the robot’s movement, with their own camera image shown on the display so that others interacting with the bot will with whom they are conversing.

A pair of 12.5″ wheels connec to DC motors via a gear box with a 37:1 ratio. These specs are necessary to recover from a sudden 20 degree loss of equilibrium, quite impressive for a bot of this stature. An Orangutan SVP board monitors a two-axis accelerometer and a gyroscope for accurate positioning data. This board automatically keeps balance, while taking user commands from a second control, a Beagle Board. The Beagle Board handles the communications, including sending and receiving the video signals, and delivering incoming position control data to the Orangutan. Separating the two systems guards against a screen-shattering fall by making sure the hardware likely to face slow-down or lockup is physically separate from that responsible for balance.

Check out the video clip after the brake to see some balancing goodness. It shouldn’t be hard to build your own version for much less than the $15k price tag enjoyed by some commercial versions.

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Function Generator Built And Mounted Inside Electronics Bench

March 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 19 Comments

A function generator is a handy piece of test equipment to have on-site. [Kammenos] designed and built his own function generator, using the bench itself as the enclosure. You can see above that the control panel presents a clean finished look. To achieve it, [Kammenos] designed and printed the panel labels on a sheet of paper, and used a piece of acrylic to protect it. The circuit inside uses a MAX038 high-frequency generator chip. This is a full-featured part that allows for great control based on a few external components. One of those is a selectable frequency range based on the capacitance value on one pin. This is selectable using a twelve-step rotary switch with a dozen different cap values. There’s also adjustment knobs for fine tuning, duty cycle, and DC offset.

Check out the video after the break for a full demonstration. If you want to build this yourself you’ll need to do some chip hunting. The MAX038 is obsolete. You may still be able to find one, but at around $20 you should be able to source a replacement with the same features and save yourself cash all in one step.

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Arduino And Open Sound Control Without An Ethernet Shield

March 27, 2011 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

Open Sound Control (OSC) is a communications protocol that can be seen as a modern alternative to MIDI. It’s specifically designed to play nicely with network communication systems. The problem with using it along with Arduino-based gadgets is that you then need to use something like an Ethernet shield to provide the network connection. [Liam Lacey] decided to use Processing as a go-between for OSC and the Arduino in lieu of the Ethernet Shield. One of the major benefits of this method is that it gives you some flexibility when it comes to how the Arduino communicates. Since a USB connected Arduino can be addressed by the Processing sketch in the same way as an AVR chip connected via an RS232 serial port, [Liam’s] method will allow you to prototype on an Arduino board, but transition to your own non-USB hardware for the finished project. The one big drawback to this method is the need to have a computer connected to your controller, but we’d bet you’d need one to run MAXmsp anyway.