Real-Life Electronic Neurons

November 19, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 25 Comments

All the kids down at Stanford are talking about neural nets. Whether this is due to the actual utility of neural nets or because all those kids were born after AI’s last death in the mid-80s is anyone’s guess, but there is one significant drawback to this tiny subset of machine intelligence: it’s a complete abstraction. Nothing called a ‘neural net’ is actually like a nervous system, there are no dendrites or axions and you can’t learn how to do logic by connecting neurons together.

NeruroBytes is not a strange platform for neural nets. It’s physical neurons, rendered in PCBs and Molex connectors. Now, finally, it’s a Kickstarter project, and one of the more exciting educational electronic projects we’ve ever seen.

Regular Hackaday readers should be very familiar with NeuroBytes. It began as a project for the Hackaday Prize all the way back in 2015. There, it was recognized as a finalist for the Best Product, Since then, the team behind NeuroBytes have received an NHS grant, they’re certified Open Source Hardware through OSHWA, and there are now enough NeuroBytes to recreate the connectome of a flatworm. It’s doubtful the team actually has enough patience to recreate the brain of even the simplest organism, but is already an impressive feat.

The highlights of the NeuroBytes Kickstarter include seven different types of neurons for different sensory systems, kits to test the patellar reflex, and what is probably most interesting to the Hackaday crowd, a Braitenberg Vehicle chassis, meant to test the ideas set forth in Valentino Braitenberg’s book, Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology. If that book doesn’t sound familiar, BEAM robots probably do; that’s where the idea for BEAM robots came from.

It’s been a long, long journey for [Zach] and the other creators of NeuroBytes to get to this point. It’s great that this project is now finally in the wild, and we can’t wait to see what comes of it. Hopefully a full flatworm connectome.

Bluetooth Photo Booth Gets Vetting At Wedding

November 15, 2017 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

With just two weeks to go before his friends’ wedding, [gistnoesis] built a well-featured robotic photo booth. Using a Bluetooth PS3 controller, guests could move the camera around, take a picture, style it in one of several ways (or not), and print it out with a single button press.

The camera is mounted on a DIY 2-axis gimbal made from extruded aluminium and 3D-printed parts. It can be moved left/right with one joystick, and up/down with the other. [gistnoesis] set up a four-panel split-screen display that shows the live feed from the camera and a diagram for the controls. The third panel shows the styled picture. Guests could explore the camera roll on the fourth panel.

LINN uses two PCs running Lubuntu, one of which is dedicated to running an open-source neural style transfer program. After someone takes a picture, they can change the style to make it look like a Van Gogh or Picasso before printing it out. A handful of wedding attendees knew about some of the extra features, like manual exposure control and the five-second timer option, and the information spread gradually. Not only was LINN a great conversation piece, it inspired multi-generational collaboration.

Despite the assembled size, LINN packs up nicely into a couple of reusable shopping bags for transport (minus the TV, of course). This vintage photo booth we saw a few years ago is more of a one-piece solution, although it isn’t as feature-rich.

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3D-Printed Robot Golem Only A Tiny Bit Creepy

November 9, 2017 by John Baichtal 13 Comments

ASPIR, the Autonomous Support and Positive Inspiration Robot is an goblin-sized robot, designed by [John Choi], aims to split the difference between smaller hobbyist robots and more robust but pricy full-sized humanoids only a research institute could afford. By contrast, [John] estimates it cost a relatively meager $2,500 to create such a homunculus.

The robot consists of 33 servos of various types moving the limb, controlled by an Arduino Mega with a servo control shield seated on it. The chassis uses 5 kg of filament and took 300 hours to print, and it has a skeleton made up of aluminum hex rods. Spring-loaded RC shocks help reinforce the shoulders. There are some nice touches, like 3D-printed hands with living hinge fingers, each digit actuated by a metal-gear micro servo. It stores its power bricks in its shins. For sensors it includes a chest-mounted webcam and a laser distance sensor.

The main design feature is the Android smartphone serving as its brains, and also — at least cosmetically — its eyes. Those eyes… might be just a teensy bit too Chucky for our taste. (Nice work, [John]!)

Robotic Arm Rivals Industrial Counterparts

November 8, 2017 by Brian McEvoy 21 Comments

We’ve seen industrial robotic arms in real life. We’ve seen them in classrooms and factories. Before today, we’ve never mistaken a homemade robotic arm for one of the price-of-a-new-home robotic arms. Today, [Chris Annin] made us look twice when we watched the video of his six-axis robotic arm. Most of the DIY arms have a personal flare from their creator so we have to assume [Chris Annin] is either a robot himself or he intended to build a very clean-looking arm when he started.

He puts it through its paces in the video, available after the break, by starting with some stretches, weight-lifting, then following it up and a game of Jenga. After a hard day, we see the arm helping in the kitchen and even cracking open a cold one. At the ten-minute mark, [Chris Annin] walks us through the major components and talks about where to find many, many more details about the arm.

Many of the robotic arms on Hackaday are here by virtue of resourcefulness, creativity or unusual implementation but this one is here because of its similarity to the big boys.

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Open Source Motor Controller Makes Smooth Moves With Anti-Cogging

November 7, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

Almost two years ago, a research team showed that it was possible to get fine motor control from cheap, brushless DC motors. Normally this is not feasible because the motors are built-in such a way that the torque applied is not uniform for every position of the motor, a phenomenon known as “cogging”. This is fine for something that doesn’t need low-speed control like a fan motor, but for robotics it’s a little more important. Since that team published their results, though, we are starting to see others implement their own low-speed brushless motor controllers.

The new method of implementing anti-cogging maps out the holding torque required for any position of the motor’s shaft so this information can be used later on. Of course this requires a fair amount of calibration; [madcowswe] reports that this method requires around 5-10 minutes of calibration. [madcowswe] also did analysis of his motors to show how much harmonic content is contained in these waveforms, which helps to understand how this phenomenon arises and how to help eliminate it.

While [madcowswe] plans to add more features to this motor control algorithm such as reverse-mapping, scaling based on speed, and better memory usage, it’s a good implementation that has visible improvements over the stock motors. The original research is also worth investigating if a cheaper, better motor is something you need.

This Drone Can Fly, Swim, And Explode….. Wait, What?

October 30, 2017 by James Hobson 17 Comments

You’ve probably heard of micro-drones, perhaps even nano-drones, but there research institutions that shrink these machines down to the size of insects. Leading from the [Wiss Institute For Biologically Inspired Engineering] at Harvard University, a team of researchers have developed a miniscule robot that — after a quick dip — literally explodes out of the water.

To assist with the take off, RoboBee has four buoyant outriggers to keep it near the water’s surface as it uses electrolysis to brew oxyhydrogen in its gas chamber. Once enough of the combustible gas has accumulated — pushing the robot’s wings out of the water in the process– a sparker ignites the fuel, thrusting it into the air. As yet, the drone has difficulty remaining in the air after this aquatic takeoff, but we’re excited to see that change soon.

Looking like a cross between a water strider and a bee, the team suggest this latest version of the RoboBee series — a previous iteration used electrostatic adhesion to stick to walls — could be used for search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and biological studies. The capacity to transition from aerial surveyor, to underwater explorer and back again would be incredibly useful, but in such a small package, it is troublesome at best. Hence the explosions.

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SimpleSumo Bots Teach More Than Fighting

October 28, 2017 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

[MechEngineerMike] wrote in to share the enthusiasm over SimpleSumo, a series of open source, customizable robots he designed for mini-sumo battling and much more. For the unfamiliar, mini-sumo is a sport where two robots try to push each other out of a ring. [Mike]’s bots are simplified versions designed for education.

[Mike] was inspired by a video of some kids building mini-sumo bots who were doing anything and everything to personalize them. He vowed to make his own affordable, easy-to-build bots with education firmly in mind. His other major requirement? They had to be as easily customizable as that one potato-based toy that eventually came with a bucket of parts. As of this writing, there are 34 interchangeable accessories.

[Mike]’s first idea was to build the bots out of custom 3D-printed building blocks. He soon found it was too much work to print consistent blocks and switched to a modular cube-like design instead. SimpleSumo bots can do much more than just fight each other. [Mike] has written programs to make them flee from objects, follow lines, find objects and push them out of the ring, and beep with increasing frequency when an object is detected.

The bots are completely open source, but [Mike] sells kits for people who can’t print the parts themselves. He’s made a wealth of information available on his website including links to outside resources about mini-sumo, Arduino, programming, and 3D design. How about a complete series of assembly videos? First one is after the break. Don’t know how to build a battle ring? He’s got that covered, too.

For a sumo bot that’s more brains than brawn, check out Zumo Red, the smart sumo.

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