Quoth The Raven: Hack Some More

October 3, 2009 by Mike Szczys 7 Comments

RavenSideCovered_IMG_0009

There are people who buy a cheap sack of candy and dutifully answer the door on Halloween. Then there are people like [Peter] who spend the whole year planning for the next year’s Hollywood-style front yard theatrics.

He added an animatronic raven to his show a few years back. It has been wildly popular and it’s not hard to see why. The bird is well engineered, well built, and the performance is very realistic. [Peter], who is an FX supervisor in the film industry, has posted a build log that takes us through step by step. This creepy performer can move its head up and down, side-to-side, and even rotate at the neck. This all happens while the beak synchronizes with talking. We marvel at the precision machining that was done to make the frame facilitate movement.

The body itself is made of fiberglass covered with feathers. [Peter] covered the completed mechanics with clay in order to sculpt the final body shape. This was used as the mold by covering it with fiberglass release and then fiberglass fabric. This process produced a very light weight and accurate shell with a minimum of effort; something we’ll keep in mind for future projects.

Take a look at a bit of video after the break. You can see the whole show from past years over at [Peter’s] site. We’ll be doing a couple of follow-ups covering his animatronic skeleton (the raven’s partner in crime) as well as the interface he uses to control and sync the voices to stay tuned! Continue reading “Quoth The Raven: Hack Some More” →

Clock Knock Block Full Of Puns

October 2, 2009 by Mike Szczys 17 Comments

This Clock Knock Block has a bit of everything; milling, Arduino, sensing, solenoids, and plenty of dirty puns. Just knock on the box or on the table right next to it and the time of day will be played back to you in a series of crisp, clean knocks. A big part of the fun here is that the box is a musical instrument.

If you take a look inside you’ll find an Arduino, a piezo sensor, a solenoid, and a nine-volt battery. The piezo sensor detects your knocking as an input. It can even listen to and repeat back a series of your knocks. The Arduino actuates the solenoid, which strikes the wooden enclosure, producing the knocking sound.

We’ve embedded a video of this useless machine after the break (that’s where all the puns are). One note for your own build; this box is made out of mahogany and because it is used as a resonance chamber, this may not work as well if it isn’t milled from a piece of quality lumber. Continue reading “Clock Knock Block Full Of Puns” →

Solar Tracking, Without Overkill

October 1, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 56 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATnnMFO60y8]

We saw this pretty smooth solar tracker run by an Arduino. There aren’t many details, but we can see that it works well, and is in fact, run by an Arduino. We knew if we posted this that people would be commenting that the Arduino is overkill. We agree. So this post is to ask, how would you do it? Give us links to the more efficient designs you have come up with. It doesn’t have to be a fully documented project, a schematic will do. We would probably go with something like a phototropic suspended bicore for simplicity and low power consumption.

[via littlebirceo]

Dean Kamen’s Prosthetic Arm

September 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 26 Comments

luke

60 minutes has covered [Dean Kamen]’s modular robotic arm. This thing is light weight, adjustable for different body frame sizes, modular, and eventually thought controlled. The system is currently functioning quite well, as you can see in the video. Current testers are controlling it with buttons under their toes, but the thought control is in the later stages of development. Sounds like science fiction right? You can see a monkey using a thought controlled arm to feed itself grapes, though we don’t think it is [Dean]’s arm.

Another cool feature of this arm is the fact that it changes its grip on your body depending on how much weight you are lifting. Lift something heavy and it grips harder. Though it has a lot of the same information, there is a little bit of different footage in [Dean]’s TED talk about the arm.

It seems to us, with microcontrollers becoming so cheap and accessible that we should be seeing more home made contraptions in this area. Are any of you working with prosthetics?

Pick-and-place Lego Prototyping

September 30, 2009 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps59Hj9RIG0]

[Ned] tipped us off about his project for a class at Carnegie Mellon. Utilizing a Denso 6-AOF robotic arm they have built a rapid prototyping machine that uses Lego as the building material. LDraw, the open standard Lego CAD program, is used to build a model which is then translated into MATLAB files that the robotic arm can use for placement commands. Right now pieces need to be placed on a template for the robot to find and pick up.

It’s great that Lego pieces are used because they are readily available and inexpensive, but this type of precision robot makes the project unattainable for most tinkerers. Still, the concept is interesting and we could see an end goal being a more widely available machine. It’s not too much of a leap to image a RepRap type machine that takes internal measurements of a circuit board and the components, calculates inside case dimensions, then builds a prototype enclosure from common Lego pieces.

Ball Catching Bot

September 29, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 11 Comments

[vimeo=http://vimeo.com/6793708]

Who needs a robot that can catch a tennis ball? We do. What would we do with it? Probably just throw tennis balls at it, that’s the only use we can think of. The work of University students in Kunzelsau and Vienna, it is actually a prototype for new transport systems for industrial robots. Though they don’t list any specific instances where this is a practical method of transport, we think maybe a tennis ball factory would be a good place to start. We can also envision a robot baseball league between this bot and the extremely dexterous ones we’ve covered before.

[via BotJunkie]

Halloween Props: DMX Controlled Skeleton

September 28, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 12 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TSbxErzhkI]

[scarylady] has posted this video about her setup. The skeleton was rigged up to a rotating base with a single pneumatic solenoid to jostle it. She then goes on to show how she has it all connected to her computer with an explanation of the software setup. Though some of us might feel she could have accomplished very similar results with a simple oscillating fan, this is a decent intro to DMX.

We also had several people submit this fantastic list of Halloween projects, The Halloween monster list. There is enough information there to keep you busy for quite a while. We were going to list our favorites, but there are so many fantastic ones, we think you should just go look at them all. Remember to send us more of your projects.