Four Cable Drawing Machine Pulls Our Strings

sandplotter

[David] has created a four cable drawing machine for the Telus Spark Science Centre in Canada. Hackaday has featured [David’s] unconventional drawing contraptions before, specifically his center pivot pen plotter. The drawing machine is a new take on a drawbot, and could be considered to be close cousins with [Dan’s] SkyCam. The premise is simple: A stepper motor with a reel of string is placed at each corner of a square. The strings for all four motors come together at a center weight. When all four strings are taut, the weight is lifted off the drawing surface. When a bit of slack is added into the strings, gravity pulls the weight down to touch the sand.

It’s at this point that a simple premise becomes a complex implementation. Moving the weight in one direction is a matter of reeling out string on one motor, and reeling in string on the other. But what about the two “un driven” strings? They have to be slack enough to allow movement in the driven direction, but not so slack that the weight can dig in and tumble on the sand, causing a tangle. To handle some of these questions, [David] called on [Kevin] to write some software. [Kevin] created a custom kinematics module for LinuxCNC to control the drawing machine. The drawing machine runs on Gerber Code, similar to a CNC. Simply feed the machine Cartesian coordinates, and [Kevin’s] module converts to steps.

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Fail Of The Week: Hackaday Writer’s First CNC Adventure

This Fail of the Week post focuses on a project from [Limkpin] aka [Mathieu Stephan], one of the Hackaday contributors. He wanted a CNC mill of his very own and decided to go with a kit that you assemble yourself. If it had been clear sailing we wouldn’t be talking about it here. Unfortunately he was met with a multitude of fails during his adventure. We’ll cover the highlights below.

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LearnCNC Game

Do you want to learn how a CNC machine works, but don’t have access to one (yet)? One of our tipsters just informed us of this great project that was created by a team of students from the University of British Columbia, and it’s an interactive 3D learning system that teaches everything about CNC machining.

We downloaded the “game” and it’s pretty cool — you get to walk around a virtual workshop and can click on various things to learn about their functions. Alternatively, you can go just go through their lessons (that appear when you click on things) on the website. It’s a great summary to get your feet wet in the world of CNC machining.

Beyond how the machines themselves work, the website also goes into great detail about the various applications you can use CNC machining for and physics behind tooling design.

Even if you’ve had a brief introduction to CNC machining before, this site provides a great summary of most everything — it’ll be very handy if you’re hoping to use a school’s machine shop for personal projects…

[Thanks Chris!]

The Making Of The WaterColorBot

water color bot

Remember the WaterColorBot? Ever wonder what goes into manufacturing a kit like it? Well the folks over at Evil Mad Scientist just spilled the beans.

It’s a great insight on how these kits are typically made in a manufacturing environment, especially if you happen to be the founders of a rather successful Kickstarter project like the WaterColorBot by [SuperAwesomeSylvia]. The article goes into great detail on minimizing material waste during CNC routing, mass producing laser engravings using a jig, hardware assembly, and finicky assembly of some of the more complex components. Not to mention boxing, storing, and packaging the finished products!

We’re happy to hear the WaterColorBot is officially shipping now, and available for purchase — Seems like they were only off by a month or so for their kickstarter delivery goals. Remember our recent post about one of these WaterColorBots out in the wild? One was used to create art using inputs from driving a real car!

Update: Semi-automatic Pick And Place Goes Fully-Automatic

automated-pick-and-place

Way back in April we looked at an impressive Pick and Place machine project which wasn’t actually up and running yet. Well it looks like [Brian Dorey] has really put the pedal to the metal with this fall, posting nine project updates since September.

The previous system was working just fine but required quite a bit of user intervention to do the actual placing. So the first modifications toward the new goal centered around motorizing the gantry. There’s a lot of information on this, as well as the vacuum tweezer heads that were designed for the system. But for us it was exciting to read about the vibrating chip feeder. This uses the vibrating motor from an Xbox controller to jiggle the ICs from their tube packaging to a staging jig off the side of the build table. You can see a video of this after the break along with a demo of the entire machine at work.

[Brian] seems to favor the Xbox parts as he also used an Xbox live camera along with OpenCV to detect the parts and ensure they are lined up correctly. For the best results possible the parts need to be illuminated properly which is why he also built a rather interesting light ring using 144 red LEDs.

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A Six Part CNC Machine

CNC

CNC machines are impressive pieces of kit. We’re all for seeing the big, burly, impressive machines, but there’s something to be said about seeing how small they can get. [Jay] has what is probably the most minimal CNC plotter we’ve ever seen, built from only six 3D printed parts.

[Jay]’s plotter is based on the Piccolo, an exceedingly small-scale CNC platform that can be built for $70 with laser-cut parts. This version, though, uses only six parts that can be downloaded from Thingiverse. Powered by an Arduino and two micro servos, this CNC plotter would be a great introduction to CNC for any robotics club or hackerspace tutorial series.

[Jay] has been doing some awesome work with CNC plotters; we saw his large format Plotterbot earlier this month, and his giant plotted HaD logo with HaD infill poster was a great submission to our Trinket contest.

Video of [Jay]’s plotter in action available after the break.

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DIY CNC Rotary 4th Axis

Here’s a great CNC hack that adds a ton of functionality, a DIY rotary 4th axis!

[Jim] had started this project over a year ago when he originally ordered the gearhead off eBay, but like many good intentions, sometimes projects just get pushed to the back burner until necessity forces action. That necessity was entering our Trinket Contest, and he decided to finish it off just so he could put a HaD logo on a piece of PVC for us!

Unfortunately it took him a bit too long, and he only finished it last week — but luckily he had a fallback plan, and submitted his CNC Etch a Sketch project instead, which won him a Trinket anyway!

The 4th axis uses a 276oz-in stepper motor which is directly coupled to a Harmonic Drive Systems 11:1 planetary gearhead. It’s extremely accurate, has minimal backlash, and by using a 10 microstepping Gecko stepper drive, [Jim] is getting about 61 steps per degree of rotation. Not bad for a home-made setup!

Check out his blog for a great write up on the project, and stick around after the break to see the 4th axis in action.

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