Tattoos By Robotic Arm With Pinpoint Accuracy

August 12, 2016 by James Hobson 66 Comments

Tattoos are an ancient art, and as with most art, is usually the domain of human expertise. The delicate touch required takes years to master, but with the capacity for perfect accuracy and precision movements, enlisting a robotic arm and some clever software to tattoo a willing canvas is one step closer thanks to the efforts of [Pierre Emm] and [Johan da Silveira].

They began by using a 3D printer modified to ‘print’ with a tattoo needle. Catching the interest of the Applied Research Lab at Autodesk, the next logical step was to use an industrial robot arm get a human under the tattooing machine — dubbed Tatoué — after scanning the limb in question and loading it into Dynamo, their parametric design environment to map the design onto the virtual limb.

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Technically A Hack. Still Questionable. Remote Control Food.

August 12, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 23 Comments

We thought we were going to read an article about, perhaps, a quadcopter that could fetch beer, or donuts. What we got was more along the lines of a donut dragging itself across the floor, rendering it pitiful and advisibly indigestible.

Sometimes people joke about not wanting to get in mind of a crazy person. We understand. While we could certainly follow [Michael Kohn]’s logic, the motivation was alien. Either way, in a rare turn of events there was not a single Arduino to be seen; just reverse engineering, unique solutions, and even a custom board. This is what some of you have been asking for… we think.

The brain of the questionable contraption is a TI MSP430G2231 and a tiny forward only motor driver circuit. The MSP waits for a signal from a hacked IR remote control from a cheap RC car. It then turns those into the appropriate motor control signals which go to some of those nice tiny metal gearboxes.

There were, naturally, a lot of technical issues in mounting the electronics to the food that, well… they didn’t need to be solved, but they were solved. For example, masking tape apparently does not stick well to green peppers, so toothpicks must be employed to pin the tape in place. Hopefully knowledge like this is scheduled for the nightly wipe while we sleep, but we’ll probably hold onto it till we die, unlike expensive piano lessons.

In the end we had a good laugh, and the idea is so dumb it will probably be an educational Kickstarter next week. Video after the break.

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Stick Balances Itself With Reaction Wheels

August 11, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 33 Comments

The inverted pendulum is a pretty classic dynamics problem and reaction wheels are cool. That’s why we like [Mike Rouleau]’s self-balancing stick.

The video, viewable after the break, was fairly sparse on details, but he furnished some in the comments. The little black box on the top is a GY-521 Gyroscope module. It sends its data to an Arduino attached to the black cord which trails off the screen. The Arduino does its mathemagic and then uses a motor controller to drive the reaction wheels at the correct speeds.
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Hackaday Prize Entry: Solar WiFi Rover Roves At Night

August 8, 2016 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

[TK] has a stretch goal for his RC car project — enabling it to recharge on solar power during the day and roam around under remote Internet control at night. It’s like a miniature, backyard version of NASA’s Curiosity rover.

Right now, he’s gotten a Raspberry Pi Zero and a camera on board, and has them controlling the robot over WiFi. He looks like he’s having a great time piloting it around his house. Check out the video down below for (crashy) remote-controlled operation.

We can’t wait to see if solar power is remotely possible (tee-hee!) as an option for this vehicle. The eventual plan to connect it via 3G cellular modem is still off in the future, and will probably demand more of the smarts of the Raspberry Pi than at present. But we love the idea of a long-running autonomous vehicle, so we’re pulling for you, [TK]!

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Single Motor Lets This Robot Do The Worm

August 7, 2016 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

With more and more research in the field of autonomous robotics, new methods of locomotion are coming on the scene at a rapid pace. Forget wheels and tracks, forget bi-, quad-, hexa- and octopods, and forget fancy rolling BB-8 clones. If you want to get a mini robot moving, maybe you should teach it to do the worm.

Neither the Gizmodo article nor the abstract of [David Zarrouk]’s paper gives too many details on the construction of this vermiform robot, but there are some clues to be gleaned from the video below. At the 1:41 mark we see the secret of the design – a long corkscrew in the center of the 3D-printed linkages.
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Simplest Jumping Kangaroo Bot

August 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 15 Comments

One of the takeaway ideas that we got from BEAM robotics was the idea that the machine itself, rather than tons of processing power, can do a lot. Your hand affords gripping, and humans have made a pretty good living out of manipulating things (he says, typing). None of this is about the brain; it’s all about the mechanism.

Which brings us to the one-motor “Runner” robot. We’ll admit that we were a little bit disappointed to see that it doesn’t run so much as hop, flop, or scoot along on the two legs and that front wheel-nose. Still, it’s an awesome mechanism, and gets the locomotion job done in a very theatrical way. We’re left wondering if using two motors would allow it to steer or just flip over and flail around on its back. Going to a six “leg” design will definitely get the job done, as demonstrated by Boston Dynamics RHex robot.
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Art And Creepy Mechanisms

August 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 4 Comments

Latvian artist [Krists Pudzens] just put on a show in Sweden and sent us the video of his amazing kinetic sculpture. (Embedded below.) We found an arty-theory writeup of another exhibition of his to share, but we had so many technical questions that we had to write him back asking for details. And boy, did he answer.

In the video, a couple of animatronic faces watch you as crab-like rope-climber bots inch upwards and red wings flap in the background. There’s a lot of brilliant mechanisms here, and aside from whatever it all means, we just like to watch machines go.

The details! Most of the pieces are plasma-cut steel or hand-cut-and-filed aluminum, and almost all of the motors are windshield wiper motors from old Russian KAMAZ and LADA cars. In another installation, the red wings (“Red Queens’ Race”) were installed in a public square and used to track the crowd, flapping faster as people moved more quickly by.

The robotic faces also use OpenCV to track you, and stare you down. One mask is vacuum-formed plastic, and the other is a copy in polyester resin and gelcoat. Here is a video of them on their own, and another of the development.

The twin rope-climbers, “Unbalanced Force”, just climb upwards at different paces. We were more than a little curious about what happens to the rope-climbers when they reach the top. [Krists] says the gallery staff grabs ladders and goes to fetch them. When he exhibited them in Poland on 20m ropes, they actually had to hire professional climbers. Life imitates art.

Some of us here at Hackaday are suckers for tech-art, whether it’s 3D-printed baroque columns, dancing with metal-bending machines, or just glowing globs of ferrofluid. There’s a lot of the same “wonder what would happen if…” tendency in the hacker and the artist — seeing possibilities and making them real.

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