Artificial Muscles To Bring Relief To Robotic Tenseness

June 6, 2016 by Moritz Walter 17 Comments

Custom, robotic prosthesis are on the rise. In numerous projects, hackers and makers have taken on the challenge. From Enabling The Future, Open Hand Project, OpenBionics to the myriad prosthesis projects on Hackaday.io. Yet, the mechatronics that power most of them are still from the last century. At the end of the day, you can only fit so many miniature motors and gears into a plastic hand, and only so many hydraulics fit onto an arm or leg before it becomes a slow, heavy brick – more hindering than helpful. If only we had a few extra of these light, fast and powerful actuators that help us make it through the day. If only we had artificial muscles.

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Robot Moth Is Learning To Fly Like A Real Moth

June 5, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

Harvard University has had the flying robot insect market covered for a long time. However, their robot bee, while cool, was starting to bum them out. They wanted to put the battery and brain on the robocritter and have it fly around without a tether. Technology just wasn’t moving fast enough for them, so they’ve picked a different bug, this time a moth.

The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is known for its Flying Winged Micro Air Vehicles or FWMAV. Which is a pretty good example of what happens when you let engineers name things. This FWMAV, weighs in at a hefty 3grams and has a 16mm wingspan. It also has propulsion, sensors, communication, brains, and power on board. Pretty impressive, the heaviest item is the motor!

The moth can produce 4g of thrust, and they’ve shown it capable of staying aloft once launched with a small catapult. Since they’ve proven that it can at least fly, the next steps are to figure out the dynamics of moth-based flight. Right now it stays pointed in the right direction with a very tiny tail fin like on an airplane. Real moths manage this feat with independent wing control, which the robot doesn’t have yet.

It will be a while before a we’ll see robot moths bumping into our computer monitors a night, stealing our passwords, but it’s a really cool exercise in robot miniaturization.

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In Soviet Russia, DIY Laser Rangefinder Scan YOU!!

June 5, 2016 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

Yakov Smirnoff used to say, “In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, Party finds YOU!!” Only here, it’s a laser rangefinder.

In this project (automatic translation), [iliasam] makes his own scanning laser rangefinder, like the ones that we’ve seen in fancy vacuum cleaners. But he does it from scratch.

While this sort of thing is easy if you have a webcam and a ton of processing power to throw at it, [iliasam] takes the hard way out — measuring the parallax of the reflected spot through a lens on a linear image sensor (which renders as “photodetector line” in translated Russian).

Linear image sensors are a lot like the elements in your CMOS digital camera, with the exception that the elements are arranged in a line instead of a plane, and they’re a lot easier to interface with a microcontroller. Hold a data line high to take an exposure, and then clock out the (analog) voltage values that correspond to the amount of light that hit each cell in the line array. While [iliasam] paid an estimated $18 for his, we’ve found them much cheaper on eBay. And there’s usually a linear sensor, often RGB and complete with driver circuitry, in a scanner if you take one apart. This could be done for just a few bucks if you were thrifty.

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Hexapod Tank From Ghost In The Shell Brought To Life

June 3, 2016 by Donald Papp 34 Comments

Every now and then someone gets seriously inspired, and that urge just doesn’t go away until something gets created. For [Paulius Liekis], it led to creating a roughly 1:20 scale version of the T08A2 Hexapod “Spider” Tank from the movie Ghost in the Shell. As the he puts it, “[T]his was something that I wanted to build for a long time and I just had to get it out of my system.” It uses two Raspberry Pi computers, 28 servo motors, and required over 250 hours of 3D printing for all the meticulously modeled pieces – and even more than that for polishing, filing, painting, and other finishing work on the pieces after they were printed. The paint job is spectacular, with great-looking wear and tear. It’s even better seeing it in motion — see the video embedded below.

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Shipwreck Exploration Vessels Fit In Minivan; Stream To Internet

June 2, 2016 by Donald Papp 2 Comments

Having to work away from the convenience of a workshop can be tough. But it’s sometimes unavoidable and it always means planning ahead. When the work area also happens to be 150m under a lake’s surface, it’s much more of a challenge – but it’s both doable and more accessible than you might think. To prove it, this DIY research vessel will be part of the robotic exploration of an underwater shipwreck. It is complete with an Ethernet bridge, long-range wireless communications, remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), the ability to hold a position, and more. The best part? It can all be packed up and fit into a minivan. We can’t put it any better than the folks at the OpenROV Forums:

In just over a week (June 6th – 9th), a bunch of people from OpenROV are going to attempt to dive a set of specially modified deep-capable ROVs to a 50m-long shipwreck at a depth of 150m below lake Tahoe. We’ll be using a deployment architecture that we’ve been perfecting over the years that involves a very small boat keeping station over the dive site while the rest of the people on the expedition run the mission from a remote location via long-range broadband radio. Since the mission control site will have an internet connection, we’ll be able to live stream the entire dive over the internet.

The purpose of the design was “to demonstrate that many of the capabilities one might think would require a large research vessel can actually be achieved with off-the-shelf parts that are more portable and much less expensive. […] There’s a lot to discover down there, and the technology readily available these days can allow us to explore it.” This mindset happens to wonderfully complement the kickoff of the Citizen Scientist Challenge portion of the 2016 Hackaday Prize.

For those times when your work can remain on solid ground, one method is to sidestep the entire issue of working away from the workshop by simply making your whole work area mobile like this incredible conversion of a truck trailer to a mobile lab.

Hackaday Prize Entry: Ears On The Back Of Your Head

May 31, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 11 Comments

From context clues, we can tell that [TVMiller] has been in and around NYC for some time now. He has observed a crucial weakness in the common metropolitan. Namely, they deafen themselves with earphones, leaving them senseless in a hostile environment.

To fix this problem, he came up with a simple hack, the metrophone. An ultrasonic sensor is hung from a backpack. The user’s noise making device of choice is plugged into one end, and the transducer into the other. When the metropolitan is approached from the rear by a stalking tiger or taxi cab, the metrophone will reduce the volume and allow the user to hear and respond to their impending doom. Augmentation successful.

The device itself consists of an off-the-shelf ultrasonic sensor, an Arduino, and a digital potentiometer. It all fits in a custom 3D printed enclosure and runs of two rechargeable coin cells. A simple bit of code scales the volume to the current distance being measured by the ultrasonic sensor once a threshold has been met.

In the video after the break, you can observe [TVMiller]’s recommended method for tranquilizing and equipping a metropolitan in its natural habitat without disturbing its patterns or stressing it unduly.

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DTMF Robot Makes Rube Goldberg Proud

May 27, 2016 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Sometimes you start building, and the project evolves. Layers upon layers of functionality accrue, accrete, and otherwise just pile up. Or at least we’re guessing that’s what happened with [Varun Kumar]’s sweet “Surveillance Car Controlled by DTMF“.

In case you haven’t ever dug into not-so-ancient telephony, Dual-tone, multi-frequency signalling is what made old touch-tone phones work. DTMF, as you’d guess, encodes data in audio by playing two pitches at once. Eight tones are mapped to sixteen numbers by using a matrix that looks not coincidentally like the old phone keypad (but with an extra column). One pitch corresponds to a column, and one to a row. Figure out which tones are playing, and you’ve decoded the signal.

Anyway, you can get DTMF decoder chips for pennies on eBay, and they make a great remote-control interface for a simple robot, which is presumably how [Varun] got started. And then he decided that he needed a cell phone on the robot to send back video over WiFi, and realized that he could also use the phone as a remote controller. So he downloaded a DTMF-tone-generator app to the phone, which he then controls over VNC. Details on GitHub.

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