Living Robots: Revisiting BEAM

May 29, 2021 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

You’re hit by the global IC shortage, reduced to using stone knives and bearskins, but you still want to make something neat? It’s time to revisit BEAM robots.

Biology, electronics, aesthetics, and mechanics — Mark Tilden came up with the idea of minimalist electronic creatures that, through inter-coupled weak control systems and clever mechanical setups, could mimic living bugs. And that’s not so crazy if you think about how many nerves something like a cockroach or an earthworm have. Yet their collection of sensors, motors, and skeletons makes for some pretty interesting behavior.

My favorite BEAM bots have always been the solar-powered ones. They move slowly or infrequently, but also inexorably, under solar power. In that way, they’re the most “alive”. Part of the design trick is to make sure they stay near their food (the sun) and don’t get stuck. One of my favorite styles is the “photovore” or “photopopper”, because they provide amazing bang for the buck.

Back in the heyday of BEAM, maybe 15 years ago, solar cells were inefficient and expensive, circuits for using their small current were leaky, and small motors were tricky to come by. Nowadays, that’s all changed. Power harvesting circuits leak only nano-amps, and low-voltage MOSFETs can switch almost losslessly. Is it time to revisit the BEAM principles? I’d wager you’d put the old guard to shame, and you won’t even need any of those newfangled microcontroller thingies, which are out of stock anyway.

If you make something, show us!

Robot Arm Adds Freedom To 3D Printer

May 25, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 6 Comments

3D printers are an excellent tool to have on hand, largely because they can print other tools and parts rapidly without needing to have them machined or custom-ordered. 3D printers have dropped in price as well, so it’s possible to have a fairly capable machine in your own home for only a few hundred dollars. With that being said, there are some limitations to their function but some of them can be mitigated by placing the printer head on a robot arm rather than on a traditional fixed frame.

The experimental 3D printer at the University of Nottingham adds a six-axis robotic arm to their printer head, which allows for a few interesting enhancements. Since the printer head can print in any direction, it allows material to be laid down in ways which enhance the strength of the material by ensuring the printed surface is always correctly positioned with respect to new material from the printer head. Compared to traditional 3D printers which can only print on a single plane, this method also allows for carbon fiber-reinforced prints since the printer head can follow non-planar paths.

Of course, the control of this printer is much more complicated than a traditional three-axis printer, but it is still within the realm of possibility with readily-available robotics and microcontrollers. And this is a hot topic right now: we’ve seen five-axis 3D printers, four-axis 3D printers, and even some clever slicer hacks that do much the same thing. Things are finally heating up in non-planar 3D printing!

Thanks to [Feinfinger] for the tip!

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Hackaday Podcast 119: Random Robot Writing, Slithering Snake Shenanigans, And Phased Array Phenomena

May 21, 2021 by Mike Szczys 2 Comments

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams pick up on the neatest hacks you may have missed. We start off with another “What’s that Sound?” so put your geeky-ears to the test and win a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt. Here are a couple of classic hacks to bring you joy: music based on Markov chains, and a squiggly take on the classic Nokia game of snake. For the more hardcore science geeks we dive into the B Meson news coming out of CERN’s physics experiments. And after taking a detour in bristle-bot-based pen plotting, we unpack the hidden system of pipes that carry oil, gas, diesel, and more from the refinery to your region.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (The best 57 MB you’ll download all day!)

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Actively Balancing A Robot With A Gyroscope

May 17, 2021 by Danie Conradie 9 Comments

Self-balancing robots are a common hacker project, but we don’t often see them using spinning gyroscopes to achieve that balance. Robot master [James Bruton] decided to build a robotic platform with active gyroscopic stabilization, starting from a simple proof of concept.

A gyroscope can balance, but cannot actively counteract external forces directly. However, if the gyroscope is tilted around an axis it will exert a force perpendicular to that axis of tilt, known as gyroscopic precession. By tilting the gyroscope with an actuator, and orienting the gyroscope correctly, gyroscopic precession can be used for stabilization. This is known as a control moment gyroscope. [James] demonstrated this with a 3D printed proof of concept, which is used as an IMU to measure the angle of tilt, and use a PID loop to correct the imbalance with a servo actuating the gyroscope.

His second platform used a pair of gyroscopes spinning in opposite directions to compensate for any unintended gyroscopic precession along another axis. A pair of roller skate wheels allow the entire platform to roll along. Due to a slight imbalance in the platform, [James] noticed that the gyroscopes will continue to creep in one direction, until reaching the end-stops and falling over. By adding a second software controller to keep track of how much the gyroscopes have to move to maintain balance, it can continuously calculate and update the balancing point. This prevents the gyroscopes from hitting the end stops.

Control moment gyroscopes are commonly used for attitude control on spacecraft, and to reduce the rolling motion of boats in waves. [James] has plans to combine a control moment gyroscope with the more conventional balancing method, to balance a robot on a single wheel.

We’ve seen a two wheeled RC cars use gyroscopes before, but without the active control part.
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Robotic Bartender Built With Industrial-Grade Hardware

May 15, 2021 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Robotic bartenders are a popular project around these parts. If there’s one thing hackers love, after all, it’s automating tasks – as much for the challenge as for the actual time saved. This build from a group of [Teknic Servo] engineers is an impressive example of what can be done with some industrial-grade hardware.

The bartender is built as a demo project for the ClearCore controller, [Teknic’s] industrial-grade device capable of interfacing with a whole bunch of servomotors and sensors to get the job done. The controller is hooked up to a bunch of ClearPath servomotors that handle spinning the bottle carousel, muddling or stirring the beverage, or transporting the drinking glass through the machine. There’s also several interlocks to avoid the patron coming into contact with the bartender’s moving parts while it’s working, and a standard bar-style mixer dispenser actuated with solenoids to keep things simple. Drink selection and control is via a touch screen, with sliders for selecting preferences such as alcohol content and sweetness.

The bartender is certainly capable of producing a neat drink (pun intended), and serves as a great example of how easily a project can be put together with industrial-grade hardware. If you’ve got the budget, you might find using an industrial plug-and-play components quicker than assembling development boards, motor controller shields and other accessories on breakout boards. There’s always more than one way to get the job done, after all.

We’ve seen some great barbots over the years, from builds relying on robotic arms to those focused on ultimate speed. Video after the break.

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Random Robot Makes Random Art

May 14, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 4 Comments

For the price of a toothbrush and a small motor with an offset weight, a bristlebot is essentially the cheapest robot that can be built. The motor shakes the toothbrush and the bristle pattern allows the robot to move, albeit in a completely random pattern. While this might not seem like a true robot that can interact with its environment in any meaningful way, [scanlime] shows just how versatile this robot – which appears to only move randomly – can actually be used to make art in non-random ways.

Instead of using a single bristlebot for the project, three of them are built into one 3D printed flexible case where each are offset by 120°, and which can hold a pen in the opening in the center. This allows them to have some control on the robot’s direction of movement. From there, custom software attempts to wrangle the randomness of the bristlebot to produce a given image. Of course, as a bristlebot it is easily subjected to the whims of its external environment such as the leveling of the table and even the small force exerted by the power/communications tether.

With some iterations of the design such as modifying the arms and control systems, she has an interesting art-producing robot that is fairly reliable for its inherently random movements. For those who want to give something like this a try, the code for running the robot and CAD files for 3D printing the parts are all available on the project’s GitHub page. If you’re looking for other bristlebot-style robots that do more than wander around a desktop, be sure to take a look at this line-following bristlebot too.

Thanks to [johnowhitaker] for the tip!

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Hackaday Podcast 118: Apple AirTag Hacked, Infill Without Perimeters, Hair-Pulling Robots, And Unpacking The 555

May 14, 2021 by Mike Szczys 5 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys gather to ooh and aah over a week of interesting hacks. This week we’re delighted to welcome special guest Kristina Panos to talk about the Inputs of Interest series she has been working on over the last couple of years. In the news is the effort to pwn the new Apple AirTags, with much success over the past week. We look at turning a screenless Wacom tablet into something more using a donor iPad, stare right into the heart of a dozen 555 die shots, and watch what happens when you only 3D print the infill and leave the perimeters out.

Take a look at the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Direct download (~55 MB)