Automatic Pneumatic Drum Kit

November 23, 2009 by Jake W 16 Comments

Move over Steve and PEART… there’s yet another robotic drummer in town. [Fauzii] tipped us off to his own MIDI-controlled creation – WizardFingers. According to him, WizardFingers is already capable of 64th note rolls at over 250 beats per minute. That’s on every drum simultaneously. Each drum is hit with a lever attached to a linear pneumatic actuator. A laptop running MAX/MSP generates MIDI sequences, which are sent to Doepfer MTC64 board. All of these actuators are hooked up to the board, which sets them off in sequence.

[Fauzii] ultimately hopes to develop AI software that will allow WizardFingers to compose its own tunes on not only a drum kit, but bar chimes and an organ as well. His site documents the whole concept quite well (just watch out for wild cats).

Outerspace: Reactive Robotics

November 18, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 17 Comments

While Outerspace may not have an extremely useful function, being an art installation, we really enjoyed reading through the build information. Basically, Outerspace is supposed to appear to be curious, exploring it’s surroundings and reacting to your contact. We do enjoy a little bit of personality in robots, so this seems like it could be fun. The head has 5 photo sensors and each piece of the “arm” has capacitive sensors. This allows Outerspace to sense what is going on. The motion itself is controlled by 4 servos in the base pulling cables that run through the body.

The programming seems like it could use a little work to achieve the effect of being “curious”, but we see potential here. You can see a video of it in action here.

[via today and tomorrow]

BEAM Robot Tumbles Aimlessly

November 17, 2009 by Mike Szczys 14 Comments

[Harm’s] tumbling robot from a few years back is an excellent study in simple motion. Foregoing wheels or legs, he uses four flippers to roll the robot around the room. Two motors are used, each in charge of two flippers. Identical but separate circuits drive the motors with a 74HC240 gate IC monitoring the continuously rotation. When a flipper becomes stuck, the circuit reverses the rotation of the motor so the simple bot can tumble its way out of a jam.

The circuitry is less advanced than some of the BEAM builds we’ve seen before. That doesn’t diminish the cleverness of his design and we think BEAM robotics are great way to get your head out of the computer code and go hardware only. After the break you can take in some video of the tumbling motion. We’ve also included a video of another bot from his website that uses concentric rings for another type of unique locomotion.

Continue reading “BEAM Robot Tumbles Aimlessly” →

R/C Airplane Motors From Computer Trash

November 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

Here’s something that the R/C airplane crowd might think of as old news. These directions show us how to rework floppy drive and CD Rom motors to be high power airplane motors. There are several listed, with details on each, but those unfamiliar might want to start with the most basic CD Rom version. It covers winding your own copper and installing the magnets in the “bell”, putting it all together and mounting it. This is a great writeup for those who haven’t seen this done before. If you want something even simpler though, you might enjoy the homopolar motor post. If you’re more advanced, they have tips for you too on machining and balancing the motors as well as winding density.

Omni-car

November 17, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB15-uSNvHA]

We stumbled onto one of [Nik Melton]’s projects, an Omni-car. It is omnidirectional, meaning it can go any direction at any time without having to turn. The body was designed by him, then printed with a 3D printer. The control scheme is what interests us though. He has found a simple way to wire it to get the job done. Sure you can see that it suffers from some pretty bad “drift” when trying to go in a straight line, but overall, we think he pulled it off well.

You might want to take a few moments to look around his project page. This guy has done a bunch of fun stuff like delta robots, strange hybrid wheel/leg robots, tesla coils, and arm mounted flamethrowers. Judging by the videos, he’s pretty young too. We think his guy has a bright future ahead of him.

USB To Serial Adapter

November 16, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 21 Comments

[Spikenzie] is at it again. This time he’s posted a nice USB to serial converter. He points out that you can buy a USB to serial adapter pretty cheaply, but sometimes you want this functionality built into your project enough to justify the greater cost. In those cases where you want to integrate it, this is an elegant solution. This design was made to be fairly compact and still usable on a breadboard. As usual, you can download the files from his website. If his work looks familiar, it’s because we’ve covered his work several times before.

[via Flickr]

Auto-drummer

November 13, 2009 by Mike Szczys 25 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COl1xmWAjUw]

Mix a cup of mechanical engineering with a dash of drum set and you end up with Steve, the robotic drummer. We know that it uses an MSA-T Midi Decoder but that’s about the extent of what has been shared. Just from observing the video, we think Steve’s got a few things going for him when compared to PEART, the robot drummer we saw back in 2005. Steve features two sticks for each drum and symbol and seems to be quite responsive.

Steve’s great, but we still think Rick Allen’s got this thing beat. Although this is a quality build, there’s no replacement for a human that can bang the drum in millions of subtly different way. That isn’t to say we don’t see potential in the hack. Perhaps it’s time to update a classic idea, the robotic orchestra. Don’t know what we mean? Check out 3:58 into the video embedded after the break.

Continue reading “Auto-drummer” →