Little Walker

August 4, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 35 Comments

lilwalker

This little walking robot caught our eye. We’ve seen tons of 4 legged bots, but the design on this probably took more effort than the electronics. The design is radially symmetrical, it can walk in any direction, turn in place, and even walk upside down. The electronics weren’t forgotten though. This little bugger manages to pull a half our of use out of each battery charging. It communicates wirelessly with a custom dual Wiimote Nunchuck setup via XBEE modules. You can find much more technical details in the captions of the pictures. We’re not positive what processing power is hidden in the bot itself, but we know there’s an Arduino in one of the nunchucks. This might be the brains of the operation leaving the hardware on the bot simply to control the servos. We really like the arc-reactor-esque power display.

Paintball Turret Plans Released

August 3, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 20 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhcNnO-LMGk]

[Jared Bouck] is on a roll this week. We just covered his Diamond thermal paste and now he’s got more for us. To celebrate the re design of his website, he has released the plans for the paintball turret. As you may recall, we absolutely loved this design when he originally showed it to us. Though he has had kits available for a while, he has finally put the plans up for download. You can cut your own parts and build it yourself. He mentions that version 2 is coming shortly, we wait with bated breath.

Amazing Robot Dexterity

July 30, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 37 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfdHY26E2jc]

Ishikawa Komuro Laboratories are doing some amazing stuff with robots right now. The video above starts out looking like a clumsy and somewhat failed attempt at dribbling a ping pong ball. Once it goes into slow motion however, we see the true action. This robot is dribbling that ball amazingly. Utilizing 1000 FPS cameras, it readjusts and hits the ball on every bounce. As the ball drifts out of the reach of the bot, suddenly we are struck with the lifelike motion. Personification can be a fleeting thing, appearing so strongly as the little bot tries in vain to reach for that ball, then disappearing again an instant later. If you really want to see some personification worthy of the crab fu challenge, check out their tool manipulation by a multi fingered hand video.

[via BotJunkie]

Thin Client As Robot Platform

July 26, 2009 by Eliot 20 Comments

geode

[Extra Ketchup] has a couple Neoware thin clients and thought they would make a good robotics platform. It’s a Geode based board that came with Windows CE. He built a small Gentoo system to fit on the 130MB solid state drive. He likes the idea of using it as a platform because the board has serial, parallel, and USB support. The best part is shown above; it can run off of just 4 AA’s.

Pet-squirting Waterwall

July 24, 2009 by Zach Banks 8 Comments

waterwall

Sometimes, pets need to be trained to stay away from certain things. Over at sump.org, his cats needed to be kept out of his room. He used their natural fear of water by creating the waterwall, a motion-sensing device that sprays water. The project is incredibly simple and uses very few components. It is based around an IR intrusion detector and a windshield washer pump. Although that worked well enough, he also hooked it up to his computer via the parallel port so that he could take pictures as the cats (or people) are sprayed. Although the project is old, it shows how few components are really needed to achieve this kind of behavior.

Related: Motion detecting cat toy

[thanks todd]

Snake Bot

July 23, 2009 by Caleb Kraft 9 Comments

sb head (Custom)

[Husstech] wrote in to share his Snake Bot with us. Initially inspired by this post about SickSack, a snake bot, he set out to build his own version. While the concept and even the design aren’t particularly new or groundbreaking, he is very thorough in his documentation. Since this was a project for school, the PDF of his project includes research, schematics, cost breakdowns, and results. We really like the camera and head design, it looks very insect like. You can see a video of the final version being shown off after the break, or you can see an earlier version that is decidedly more phallic.

Continue reading “Snake Bot” →

Printing A RepRap

July 22, 2009 by Zach Banks 61 Comments

repstrap

The RepRap project has been working on bringing 3D printing to the masses by creating a extrusion printer that can also make the majority of its own parts. For the most part, these print ABS or HDPE plastics which are strong and recyclable. In order to create these replicating printers, similar machines called RepStraps are built out of either laser-cut parts or machined elements. They are functionally equivalent to RepRap printers, but are not made of printed parts. [nophead] documented his RepStrap, HydraRaptor, that is based off a milling machine. He had already printed a set of RepRap parts, and he documented printing a second set. The machine worked for about 100 hours over the course of 2 weeks, printing about 1.5 kg of parts. He made a few adjustments, such as replacing ABS bearings with HDPE to reduce friction. The parts are for Factor e Farm so they can get started with 3D printing.

Related: RepRap pinch wheel extruder