Gamecube Robot Is More Than Meets The Eye

January 21, 2014 by 23 Comments

[Joshua] had his old Gamecube kicking around. Rather than let it gather dust, he took it into the machine shop at Harvey Mudd College and used its body as the shell of a mobile robot. With a bit of thought, it turns out that you can fit quite a lot inside the rather small Gamecube case. [Joshua] started with a couple of R/C plane style brushless outrunner motors. These motors generally give more torque and spin slower than their inrunner counterparts. Several thousand RPM was still too fast to directly drive the LEGO tires though. He needed a gear reduction.

Gears and tight spaces usually send people running for the SDP/SI website. We’ve used SDP/SI parts before, and have found that they make incredibly accurate gears and assemblies. Things can get pricey, however, when you’re buying two of everything. In search of a solution a bit more within his college-student-budget, [Joshua] looked at radio control servos. R/C servos have some rather strong output gears, especially the metal gear variety. Even with strong gears, parts do break in crashes, so replacement gear sets are available and cheap. [Joshua] settled on gears made for Hitec servos. His next problem was finding a pinion gear for his motors. That turned out to be easy, as 64 pitch gears commonly used in RC cars mesh with metric servo gears.  The final results are great. His robot has tons of torque and plenty of speed to zip around. The only thing it’s missing is a brain. Videos after the break.

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A Balancing, Walking Cube Named Cubli

December 19, 2013 by 44 Comments

Meet Cubli! Cubli is a 15 x 15 x 15cm robotic cube that can roll around and balance on its corners using a series of gyroscopes.

The project has been going strong since February 2011 at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control in Zurich, where it is starting to get quite impressive. We first shared Cubli earlier this year, when it was just a wee 2-dimensional and corded 3-dimensional prototype.

Since then, it has become a fully enclosed wireless cube capable of jumping up on its end, balancing, and controlled falling — it can walk and roll! To do this, it has three large reaction wheels on each axis which can impart their angular velocity on the entire cube when the braked, allowing it to move in any direction.

According to the video after the break, the team is just building the cube “because they can”, however other researchers are interested in the technologies applications in self-assembling robots, and even planetary exploration.

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Turning A Building Into A Rubik’s Cube

December 12, 2013 by 9 Comments

cube

[Javier] must have an awesome academic adviser. For his master’s thesis, he turned a building into a Rubik’s cube.

The Ars Electronic Center in Linz, Austria, is a building with a whole bunch of colored, programmable lights on the facade. [Javier] thought this would make for an excellent Rubik’s cube, and set to work convincing his thesis advisers this idea was possible, and building the hardware and software.

Since only two sides of the building are visible at any one time, [Javier] needed to build a controller for this project. The solution was to build a normal Rubik’s cube and stuff a microcontroller and a FreeIMU in the center. This setup senses the twists and turns of the Rubik’s cube, as well as it’s position in space, effectively creating an interface between the hand and a giant light-covered building.

The Rubik’s cube interface connects to a computer running an app written in openFrameworks. By sensing the direction the cube is oriented, it can automatically display the two sides of the cube facing the user.

There’s a great video showing just how this building-sized Rubik’s cube works. You can check that out below.

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Tiny 3x3x3 SMD LED Cube

December 4, 2013 by 12 Comments

led cube

LED cubes are cool, but they’re usually pretty big and clunky. [One49th] set out to make one of the smallest LED cubes we’ve seen yet, and he’s shared how he did it in his Instructable!

His first LED cube was the traditional kind, and it turned out pretty nice. But he wanted to go smaller — what about using SMD’s? What he did next was no simple feat — in fact, we’d be willing to call him an artist with a soldering iron. The array is just over one centimeter across.

Using a combination of vices and pliers he soldering each SMD onto his structure one by one. Each LED anode is tied together on each horizontal layer. Each cathode is tied together on each vertical column. This allows the TinyDuino to control any one LED by knowing which of the 9 columns and 3 layers the LED is on. Send a high signal to chosen layer, and a low signal to the column to light the LED. Doing this quickly allows you to create the illusion of different LEDs being on at the same time. Take a look through his image gallery to see just how tight the soldering quarters were, it’s definitely not something we’re planning on doing anytime soon!

Looking for a bigger cube? Check out this gorgeous 7x7x7 one that is capable of 142 frames per second!

PocketQubes: Even Smaller Than A CubeSat

October 2, 2013 by 24 Comments

Qube

Over one hundred CubeSats have been launched by hundreds of organizations and universities from around the globe. These have proven very useful in technology demonstration, Earth imaging, and other applications. There is, however, one large downside to the CubeSat platform. Even though it is designed to hitch a ride on launches of larger satellites, they’re still very expensive to develop and launch – somewhere between $60,000 and $125,000.

PocketQubes are a new design of satellite that bring the cost of personal satellites down to what Universities and amateur radio enthusiasts can actually afford. Instead of spending $125k on a 10cm cube CubeSat, the PocketQube, a 5cm cube, can be launched to a 700 km orbit for about $20,000.

Already, four PocketQubes are scheduled for launch in November to a 700km solar synchronous orbit, including $50SAT, a small radio transceiver put together by some ham guys, and The WREN a very impressive PocketQube with 3-axis reaction wheels and plasma thrusters.

Right now, the PocketQube kickstarter is only for aluminum structures that will become the skeleton of a small, 5cm cube satellite. There’s also the PocketQube Shop that provides a little more background on the project.

Cube 3D Printer Hack Lets You Use Bulk Filament

April 26, 2013 by 201 Comments

[Chris Nafis] crunched the numbers and found out he could get filament for his 3D printer in bulk for about one-fifth the cost of the cartridges the company sells. This led him to print a feeder for his Cube 3D printer.

We’re skeptical about the Cube 3D printer’s cartridges. They contain a spool of filament, but also include a chip which reports back the filament color and length remaining. We’re sure this provides some nice functionality for those looking to press a button and walk away. But we see it as an annoyance like the laser toner cartridges that stop working based on page count rather than remaining toner.

The solution [Chris] went with still uses the cartridges to ‘trick’ the machine into printing. Basically the interface will tell you that you don’t have enough filament left, but as long as there’s a cartridge in place you can tell it to print anyway. The green adapter he printed has a pass-through for the stock cartridge as well as the bulk spool you see to the left.

This Cube Is Made For Walkin’

March 14, 2013 by 32 Comments

cubli

Meet Cubli, a research project which aims to make a cube that can walk around without using any appendages. It’s a research project at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and control in Switzerland. Anyone else thinking about our beloved companion cube right now?

The robotic experiments are based on angular momentum. Inside of the cube there are center mounted motors which each spin a wheel. Three of these are mounted perpendicular to each other to give the cube the ability to change its position along any axis. This is best shown by the first video after the break where just a single side of the assembly is demonstrated. A square frame starts at a rest position. You see the wheel spin up and it is suddenly stopped, which causes the momentum of the wheel to pop the square frame up onto one corner. The wheel then switches into a second mode to keep it balancing there. The final mode is a controlled fall. This theoretically will let the cube move around by falling end over end. So far they’re not showing off that ability, but the second demo video does show the assembled cube balancing on one corner.

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