Hackaday Prize 2023: Bolt Bot Micro Servo Droids

May 9, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 1 Comment

This Hackaday prize entry from [saul] is the beginning of a reconfigurable kit of 3D printed parts and servo motors for robotics learning. With just access to a printer, a few cheap-as-chips servo motors, an Arduino, and some nuts and bolts, you could be hacking together robot walkers within a few hours of starting!

Bolt Bots is very simple to understand, with all the mechanics and wiring out there in the breeze, but strictly for indoor use we reckon. If you want to add remote control to your application, then drop in one of the ubiquitous nRF24L01 boards and build yourself a copy of the remote control [saul] handily provides in this other project.

There really isn’t a great deal we can say about this, as it’s essentially a build kit with quite a few configuration options, and you just have to build with it and see what’s possible. We expect the number of parts to proliferate over time giving even more options. So far [saul] demonstrates a few flavors of ‘walkers’, a rudimentary ‘robot arm’, and even a hanging drawbot.

The bolt hardware can be found in this GitHub repo, and the remote control code in this second one.

Servo-based designs are sometimes sneered at due to their dubious accuracy and repeatability, but with a little of effort, this can be vastly improved upon. Also, multi-legged walkers need multiple servos and controllers to drive ’em. Or do they?

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Arctos Robotics: Build A Robot Arm Out Of 3D Printer Spares?

May 8, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 11 Comments

ARCTOS is a 6-DOF robot arm based upon 3D printed mechanics running a modified version of GRBL firmware. Let’s get this straight now, the firmware is open source, but the hardware plans are a paid download, but for less than forty euros, we reckon the investment would be well worth it, judging from the quality of the build instructions and the software support already in place. Continue reading “Arctos Robotics: Build A Robot Arm Out Of 3D Printer Spares?” →

$60 Robot Arm Is Compact

April 24, 2023 by Al Williams 10 Comments

Thanks to 3D printing and inexpensive controllers, a robot arm doesn’t need to break the bank anymore. Case in point? [Build Some Stuff] did a good-looking compact arm with servos for under $60. The arm uses an interesting control mechanism, too.

Instead of the traditional joystick, the arm has a miniature arm with potentiometers at each joint instead of motors. By moving the model arm to different positions, the main arm will mimic your motions. It is similar to old control systems using a synchro (sometimes called a selsyn), but uses potentiometers and servo motors.

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A home-made tape robot that stores VHS tapes

VHS Robot Swaps Tapes, As Seen In Hackers

April 23, 2023 by Robin Kearey 27 Comments

Tape robots are typically used in places that store vast amounts of data – think film studios and government archives. If you’ve seen the 1995 cult movie Hackers, you might remember a scene where the main character hacks into a TV station and reprograms their tape ‘bot to load a series he wanted to watch. It’s this scene that inspired [Nathan] over at [Midwest Cyberpunk] to make his own tape robot that loads VHS tapes.

[Nathan] has thousands of tapes in his collection, but the robot is not built to manage all of them. Instead, it’s meant to help him run his VHS streaming channel, saving him from having to physically go to his VCR every time a tape needs swapping. For that, a ten-tape storage capacity is plenty.

The main parts of the tape robot are a grabber that holds the tape, an extender that moves it forward and backward, and a linear rail that moves it up and down. The vertical motion is generated by a hybrid stepper motor through a belt drive system, while the grabber and extender are operated pneumatically. Once the grabber reaches the VCR, a pneumatic pusher shoves the tape inside. All of this is nearly identical to the robot seen in the movie, which was most likely not a commercial machine but a custom-made prop.

The whole system is controlled by an ESP32 running FluidNC inside the robot as well as a handmade cyberdeck next to it that manages the overall process of loading and storing tapes. Although [Nathan] is currently using the robot for his streaming channel, he’s planning to also use it for digitizing part of his massive tape collection, which contains a few titles that were never released on newer formats.

Working with old tapes can be tricky: some types of tape degrade over time, while others might come with primitive copy protection systems. But moving information over to newer media is a necessity if you don’t want to risk losing it forever.

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Air Hockey Solitaire

April 22, 2023 by Al Williams 3 Comments

While air hockey is a fine amusement, it isn’t much fun if you can’t find someone to play against. Unless that is, you build a mini table with a robotic defender. [Vaib], [Nathan], and [Navish] can show you how. There is a video you can see below that shows two players using the table without the robot.

The project takes a bit of woodworking, as you might expect. You also have to drill 576 holes for the air to lift the puck. Some of the components are 3D printed in PETG, too. The automated defense uses a camera and relies on the fact that the puck is the only red thing on the table. A servo moves to intercept the incoming puck and return the shot. We were disappointed the video didn’t show the automated play.

We wondered if they had considered making a pair of the detachable robots and letting them play with each other. If you prefer football, the robot could probably adapt. We’ve seen other robot air hockey contenders, so maybe a better idea would be to build different robots and let them compete for a gold medal.

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Send This FPV Bot Into The Crawlspace To Do Your Dirty Work

April 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney 27 Comments

The least pleasant space in most houses is likely to be the space below it. Basements tend to be dank, dusty, and full of too many things that have too many legs. And even worse than the full basement is the dreaded crawlspace, which adds claustrophobia to the long list of unpleasantries that lie below. Sadly, though, a crawlspace might be a handy place to run wires, and if you’re hesitant to delve too deeply, this FPV cable-laying rig might be something to keep in mind.

This one comes to us from [Old Alaska] with very little detail other than what’s in the brief video below. The setup is clear enough — a need to run an Ethernet cable from one side of the house to the other, and a crawlspace to do it in. Also in the toolkit was an RC rock crawler with a field-expedient FPV camera. With Breaking Bad-style access to the crawlspace through a few floorboards, [Old Alaska] was able to deploy the crawler dragging a Cat 5 cable behind it. The terrain under the house made the rock crawler a good choice, with four-wheel-drive, locking differentials, and an articulating frame. The bot’s-eye view also makes it clear that actually crawling in this rubble-strewn crawlspace would be a painful affair.

With very little drama, [Old Alaska] was able to navigate the crawler across the crawlspace to the outer wall of the house, where he could fish the wire out and complete the connection — no fuss, no muss, no bloody knees. The only quibble we’d have is not running an extra length of pull rope with the wire. You never know when it’ll come in handy.

The whole thing reminds us of a more tactical version of [Cliff Stoll]’s subterranean inventory management bot.

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Retired Welding Robot Picks Up Side Hustle As CNC Router

April 11, 2023 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Who says you can’t teach an old robot new tricks? Nobody, actually. That saying is about dogs. But it applies to robots too, at least judging by the way this late-90s industrial beast was put to use in a way it was never intended: as a giant CNC router.

The machine in question is an ABB IRB6400, a six-axis, floor-mounted industrial machine that had a long career welding at a Eurorail factory in Austria before [Brian Brocken] made its acquaintance. He procured the non-working machine — no word on what he paid for it — and moved the 2-ton paperweight into his shop, itself a non-trivial endeavor. After a good scrubbing, [Brian] tried to get the machine started up. An error prevented the robot controller from booting; luckily, there’s a large community of ABB users, and [Brian] learned that one of the modules in the controller needed replacement.

After fixing that — and swapping out the controller’s long-dead backup batteries, plus replacing the original 1.44 MB floppy drive with a USB drive — he was able to bring the machine back to life. Unfortunately, the limited amount of internal memory made it difficult to use for anything complicated, so [Brian] came up with an application to stream coordinates to the controller over a serial port, allowing for unlimited operation. With that in place, plus a simple spindle mounted to the robot’s wrist with a 3D printed adapter, [Brian] was able to carve foam blocks into complex shapes. The video below shows everything from delivery to first chips — well, dust at least.

This build seems to be a significant escalation from [Brian]’s previous large-format CNC machine. He must have something interesting in mind, so stay tuned for details.

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