[Easton’s] Animatronic Hand Gets 3D Printed Upgrade

August 29, 2011 by Mike Szczys 10 Comments

[Easton] as been working with [Jeremy Blum] to come up with the newest version of his animatronic hand. You may remember seeing [Easton’s] first animatronic hand, with which he won his regional science fair and made a trip to nations. Since then he’s been working on improvements, and with access to [Jeremy’s] Makerbot he harnessed the power of open source design to make his own printed hand, extending a different Thingiverse project.

He’s still using the original sensor glove as a controller. It sends commands to the Arduino controlling the arm via an Xbee module. From there, five servos inside a fiberglass forearm move each finger and the thumb. The video clip after the break gives [Easton] a chance to show off all of the new design features, and finishes with a demonstration of the hand grasping different objects. We had a chance to chat with him briefly. He’s got big goals for himself, aiming to design a prosthetic arm for under $1000. That’s not a career goal… he’d like to get it done this year.

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How Not To Build A Robotic Lawnmower

August 25, 2011 by Mike Nathan 26 Comments

[shadeydave] wanted to build his own Lawnbot, but he had no idea where to start. He purchased some DIY plans online which looked like they would get the job done, but then he strayed from the path in a big way and spent gobs of money in the process.

In his Instructable writeup, he details each misstep he made, explaining why his choices were bad as well as how much each mistake cost him. It sounds like pretty much everything that could go wrong did go wrong, from spending money on unnecessary microcontrollers to choosing the wrong wheels. Our favorite part is where he mentions that he couldn’t figure out how to create a “kill switch” for the Lawnbot in the event that his transmitter loses contact with the speedy whirling death machine.

[shadeydave] is well aware of how poorly his build went, and primarily wrote it up as a cautionary tale to others out there who might decide to take on a similar project. He says that the Lawnbot works for the most part, but with his newfound wisdom he will be revising the bot, having learned from his mistakes.

We actually like to see this kind of writeup as they can be quite beneficial to someone trying to put together a similar project. So if you have some major flubs under your belt, don’t be shy about digging them out and letting us know. As Thomas Edison said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Continue reading to see a quick video tour of [shadeydave’s] mostly working Lawnbot.

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Kinect-controlled Delta Robot Has A Magnetic Personality

August 23, 2011 by Mike Nathan 10 Comments

kinect_controlled_delta_robot

[Malte] is a loyal Hackaday reader and neurobiology PhD candidate with a keen interest in hobby robotics – definitely our kind of guy! He wrote in to share a project he has been working on in his spare time, a Kinect-controlled delta robot (Google translation).

Deltares, as it is called, is pretty straightforward as far as delta robots are concerned. It uses three servos to actuate the arms, which are controlled by an AVR micro running BASCOM. The AVR gets its coordinate data from his computer via a serial connection after it has been captured by the Kinect. [Malte] opted to use Microsoft’s official SDK for the project, processing the Kinect skeletal data using a small C# application he wrote.

The end result is pretty neat as you can see in the pair of videos below. In the first video, [Malte] uses Deltares as a plotter, drawing a crude face on a piece of paper with a marker. In the second, he commands Deltares with his right hand, using his left to activate the magnetic solenoid to pick up the steel spheres.

It looks pretty cool to us, and we’d love to see what sorts of things he puts together if he ever ends up making robotics his career rather than a hobby.

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Tree Climbing Bot Climbs Tree

August 23, 2011 by Nick Schulze 15 Comments

To test his new skills with his Arduino, [Ben] decided that he would build a robot. With no particular need to fill other than the need to build something cool he chose to build himself a tree climbing robot. He designed the body of the robot in Google Sketchup before beginning the build. The body is made mainly from aluminium, with four motors for the gripping legs and one for the spine. [Ben] controlled the motors with the familiar L298 motor driver chip and measured their position and speed using some cleverly mounted potentiometers. The robot can climb trees of varying diameter by using the speed of the motors driving the legs to determine when the tree has been gripped.

[Ben] was then kind enough to write up a full instructable describing the build, this project includes a bit of everything, from motor control and liner drives to tips on creating a robot frame; a good read for someone wanting to get into robotics. Also check out the video after the break to see the robot in action.

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Basic Animatronics Continued: Servo Actuated Mouth

August 21, 2011 by Jesse Congdon 4 Comments

[Chris] is at it again and this time he has put together a tutorial rounding off his animatronic face by actuating the mouth. His tutorial covers two different styles of robot mouth: an LCD mouth which dims to imply actuation and a servo articulated flap.

[Chris] covers all the aspects of each mouth type, from the basics of human mouth actuation to servo motor control. In this case the LCD mouth is not quite as impressive so it gets installed on a face mock up while the servo mouth goes on the face previously featured in his other tutorials. The entire setup is still controlled using a single PIC 18F452. The circuit diagrams and code for both types of mouth are all available on the site including videos of the actuated mouth and a gif of the LCD mouth in action.

Check out a video of the articulated mouth below throwing down some classic season 6 Jean-Luc. If you are interested in the other parts of the face we have covered [Chris]’s other tutorials on the eyebrows and the eyeballs. These are a great jumping point for your own animatronic face project and do a great job of setting up all the know how you’d need to build your own emotional puppet.

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Robotic Arm And Claw Sculpted Entirely From ShapeLock

August 19, 2011 by Mike Nathan 24 Comments

shapelock_robotic_claw

[Alexey] wrote in to share a mechanical claw (Google Translation) he has been hard at work on for quite some time. While a lot of people will turn to some sort of 3D plastic printer such as the MakerBot if they need plastic parts built, [Alexey] didn’t have access to one. Instead, he carefully crafted the entire mechanism from polycaprolactone, or as it’s more commonly known, Shapelock.

Using a wide range of tools from hair dryers and knives to lighting fixtures, he manually sculpted the claw and its control arm out of plastic, piece by piece. We are particularly impressed by the gearing he was able to cut from the plastic, which can be finicky at times.

As you can see in the video below, The claw mimics each movement he makes with the control arm via a handful of Arduino-driven servos. Everything seems to work quite well, and despite the rough translation by Google, we think this is a great project. If you are looking to do something similar yourself, he has plenty of pictures on his site, which should give you a pretty good idea as to how things were put together.

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Robotic Artist Listens To Your Criticism

August 18, 2011 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

[Ben Grosser] built an interactive painting robot that’s pretty far removed from the LED and Arduino builds we usually see. The robot is adapted from one of the many CNC routers we’ve featured over the years. The control system is written in Python and uses genetic algorithms and a microphone to decide what to paint next.

Robot artists have been around for decades now. When [Harold Cohen] exhibited his robotic artist AARON, gallery patrons lined up to watch a robot paint. The paintings were originally just a monochrome line drawing that was later colored in by [Cohen]. [Ben] made his robot paint directly onto canvas with oil paints, so there’s no question of what the computer intends the final product to be.

[Ben] came up with a really neat build, but we’re wondering about having this robot artist on display inside a cavernous exhibition hall. Surely the echos from the servos and stepper motors would be picked up by the mic and interpreted by the painting algorithm. Barring some control systems, it would probably be the robot’s commentary on its own decent into madness.

Check out a video of the robot in action after the break, followed by a violin/robot duet the shows how the audio is interpreted.

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