Robots Hacks

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Cara robot dog

From Leash To Locomotion: CARA The Robotic Dog

July 13, 2025 by 9 Comments

Normally when you hear the words “rope” and “dog” in the same sentence, you think about a dog on a leash, but in this robot dog, the rope is what makes it move, not what stops it from going too far. [Aaed Musa]’s latest project is CARA, a robotic dog made mostly of 3D printed parts, with brushless motors and ropes used to tie the motors and legs together.

In a previous post, we covered [Aaed Musa]’s use of rope as a mechanism to make capstan drives, enabling high torque and little to no backlash. Taking that gearbox design, tweaking it a bit, and using three motors, he was able to make a leg capable of moving in all three axes. He had to do a good deal of inverse kinematics math to get the leg moving around as desired; once he had the motion of a step defined, it was time to build the rest of the dog.

CARA is made primarily of 3D printed parts, with several carbon fiber tubes running its length for rigidity. The legs are all free to move not only forward and back but side to side some, as in a real dog. He uses 12 large brushless motors, as they provide the torque needed, and ODrive S1 motor controllers to control each one, controlled over CAN by a Teensy 4.1 microcontroller. There is also a small BNO086 IMU to sense CARA’s position relative to gravity, and a 24V cordless tool battery powers everything.

Once assembled, there was some more tuning of what type of motion CARA’s legs take while walking. There were a few tweaks to the printed parts to address some structural issues, and then a good deal more inverse kinematics math to make full use of the IMU, allowing CARA to handle inclines and make a much more natural movement style. [Aaed Musa] does a great job explaining his approach on his site as well as in the video below; we’re looking forward to seeing his future projects!

CARA isn’t alone on this site—be sure to check out the other robot dogs we’ve featured here.

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Meet Cucumber, The Robot Dog

June 27, 2025 by 6 Comments

Robots can look like all sorts of things, but they’re often more fun if you make them look like some kind of charming animal. That’s precisely what [Ananya], [Laurence] and [Shao] did when they built Cucumber the Robot Dog for their final project in the ECE 4760 class.

Cucumber is controllable over WiFi, which was simple enough to implement by virtue of the fact that it’s based around the Raspberry Pi Pico W. With its custom 3D-printed dog-like body, it’s able to move around on its four wheels driven by DC gear motors, and it can flex its limbs thanks to servos in its various joints. It’s able to follow someone with some autonomy thanks to its ultrasonic sensors, while it can also be driven around manually if so desired. To give it more animal qualities, it can also be posed, or commanded to bark, howl, or growl, with commands issued remotely via a web interface.

The level of sophistication is largely on the level of the robot dogs that were so popular in the early 2000s. One suspects it could be pretty decent at playing soccer, too, with the right hands behind the controls. Video after the break.

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BLDC wire winding machine

Making A Brushless DC Motor Winding Machine

June 17, 2025 by 35 Comments

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Yuchi] is building an STM32 BLDC motor winding machine.

This machine is for winding brushless motors because manual winding is highly labor intensive. The machine in turn is made from four brushless motors. He is using the SimpleFOC library to implement closed-loop angle control. Closed-loop torque control is also used to maintain correct wire tension.

The system is controlled by an STM32G431 microcontroller. The motor driver used is the DRV8313. There are three GBM5208 75T Gimbal motors for close-loop angle control, and one BE4108 60T Gimbal motor for torque control. The torque control motor was built with this machine! [Yuchi] says that the Gimbal motors used are designed to be smooth, precise, and powerful at low speeds.

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Red and black grabber combat robot

Step Into Combat Robotics With Project SVRN!

June 11, 2025 by 4 Comments

We all love combat robotics for its creative problem solving; trying to fit drivetrains and weapon systems in a small and light package is never as simple as it appears to be. When you get to the real lightweights… throw everything you know out the window! [Shoverobotics] saw this as a barrier for getting into the 150g weight class, so he created the combat robotics platform named Project SVRN.

You want 4-wheel drive? It’s got it! Wedge or a Grabber? Of course! Anything else you can imagine? Feel free to add and modify the platform to your heart’s content! Controlled by a Malenki Nano, a receiver and motor controller combo board, the SVRN platform allows anyone to get into fairyweight fights with almost no experience.

With 4 N10 motors giving quick control, the platform acts as an excellent platform for various bot designs. Though the electronics and structure are rather simple, the most important and impressive part of Project SVRN is the detailed documentation for every part of building the bot. You can find and follow the documentation yourself from [Shoverobotics]’s Printables page here!

If you already know every type of coil found in your old Grav-Synthesized Vex-Flux from your Whatsamacallit this might not be needed for you, but many people trying to get into making need a ramp to shoot for the stars. For those needing more technical know-how in combat robotics, check out Kitten Mittens, a bot that uses its weapon for locomotion!

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Origami assembly line.

Building An Assembly Line For Origami Pigeons

June 9, 2025 by 12 Comments

When it comes to hacks, the best ones go to extremes. Either beautiful in their simplicity, or magnificent in their excess. And, well, today’s hack is the latter: excessive. [HTX Studio] built an assembly line for origami pigeons!

One can imagine the planning process went something like this:

  1. Make origami pigeon assembly line
  2. ?
  3. Profit

But whatever the motivation, this is an impressive and obviously very well engineered machine. Even the lighting is well considered. It’s almost as if it were made for show…

Now, any self-respecting nerd should know the difference between throughput and latency. From what we could glean from the video, the latency through this assembly line is in the order of 50 seconds. Conservatively it could probably have say 5 birds in progress at a time. So let’s say every 10 seconds we have one origami pigeon off the assembly line. This is a machine and not a person so it can operate twenty four hours a day, save downtime for repairs and maintenance, call it 20 hours per day. We could probably expect more than 7,000 paper pigeons out of this machine every day. Let’s hope they’ve got a buyer lined up for all these birds.

If you’re interested in assembly lines maybe we could interest you in a 6DOF robotic arm, or if the origami is what caught your eye, check out the illuminating, tubular, or self-folding kind!

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3D Pen Used To Build Cleaning Robot That Picks Up Socks

June 6, 2025 by 11 Comments

Your average 3D printer is just a nozzle shooting out hot  plastic while being moved around by a precise robotic mechanism. There’s nothing stopping you replacing the robot and moving around the plastic-squirting nozzle yourself. That’s precisely what [3D Sanago] did to produce this cute little robot.

The beginning of the video sets the tone. “First we create the base that will become the robot vacuum’s body,” explains [3D Sanago]. “I quickly and precisely make a 15 x 15 cm square almost as if I were a 3D printer.” It’s tedious and tiring to move the 3D printing pen through the motions to build simple parts, but that’s the whole gimmick here. What’s wild is how good the results are. With the right post-processing techniques using an iron, [3D Sanago] is able to produce quite attractive plastic parts that almost justify the huge time investment.

The robot itself works in a fairly straightforward fashion. It’s got four gear motors driving four omniwheels, which let it pan around in all directions with ease. They’re under command of an Arduino Uno paired with a multi-channel motor driver board. The robot also has a servo-controlled arm for moving small objects. The robot lacks autonomy. Instead, [3D Sanago] gave it a wireless module so it could be commanded with a PS4 controller. Despite being referred to as a “robot vacuum,” it’s more of a general “cleaning robot” since it only has an arm to move objects, with no actual vacuum hardware. It’s prime use? Picking up socks.

We’ve seen [3D Sanago]’s fine work before, too. Video after the break.

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A Lego vehicle crossing a gap between two benches.

Making A LEGO Vehicle Which Can Cross Large Gaps

June 3, 2025 by 6 Comments

Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle which can cross increasingly large gaps.

At the time of writing this video from [Brick Experiment Channel] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like that there is a fairly good chance that many of our readers have already seen this video, but this is the sort of video one could happily watch twice.

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