Robot Hand Goes Wireless

March 13, 2017 by Al Williams 7 Comments

We can’t decide if [MertArduino’s] robotic hand project is more art or demonstration project. The construction using springs, fishing line, and servo motors isn’t going to give you a practical hand that could grip or manipulate anything significant. However, the project shows off a lot of interesting construction techniques and is a fun demonstration for using nRF24L01 wireless in a project. You can see a video of the contraption, below.

A glove uses homemade flex sensors to send wireless commands to the hand. Another Arduino drives an array of servo motors that make the fingers flex. You don’t get fine control, nor any real grip strength, but the hand more or less will duplicate your movements. We noticed one finger seemed poorly controlled, but we suspect that was one of the homemade flex sensors going rouge.

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Ardu McDuino Plays The Bagpipes

January 10, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 27 Comments

To “pipe in” the new year, [John] decided to build a bagpipe-playing robot. Unlike other instrument-playing robots that we’ve seen before, this one is somewhat anatomically correct as well. John went the extra mile and 3D printed fingers and hands to play his set of pipes.

The brains of the robot are handled by an Arduino Mega 2560, which drives a set of solenoids through a driver board. The hands themselves are printed from the open source Enabling the Future project which is an organization that 3D prints prosthetic hands for matched recipients, especially people who can’t otherwise afford prosthetics. He had to scale up his hands by 171% to get them to play the pipes correctly, but from there it was a fairly straightforward matter of providing air to the bag (via a human being) and programming the Arduino to play a few songs.

The bagpipe isn’t a particularly common instrument (at least in parts of the world that aren’t Scottish) so it’s interesting to see a robot built to play one. Of course, your music-playing robot might be able to make music with something that’s not generally considered a musical instrument at all. And if none of these suit your needs, you can always build your own purpose-built semi-robotic instrument as well.

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3D-Printed Prosthetic Puts The Power In The Hands Of Those Who Need It

September 5, 2016 by James Hobson 13 Comments

In recent years, prosthetics have seen a dramatic increase in innovation due to the rise of 3D printing. [Nicholas Huchet] — missing a hand due to a workplace accident in 2002 — spent his residency at Fab Lab Berlin designing, building, testing and sharing the files and tutorials for a prosthetic hand that costs around 700 Euros.

[Huchet] founded Bionicohand with the intent of using the technology to make prosthetic limbs available to those without reliable medical or social assistance — as well as for amputees in countries without such systems — which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. The parts took a week to print while assembly and modifications to suit [Huchet’s] arm took another four days, but the final product is functional and uses affordable myoelectric sensors, boards and servos — plus there’s always the option of using a basic 3D scanner to accommodate for existing prosthetic mounts for the individual.

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Hedberg Is A Bionic Hand Made From A Single Keurig

August 12, 2016 by Cameron Coward 11 Comments

Developing into a modern hacker and tinkerer requires a lot of things: electronics study, programming knowledge, and patience (among many other things). But, the most important quality a hacker can have is curiosity. The desire to see how things work is what drives most budding hackers towards the dismantling of family appliances and electronic gadgets.

Many end up scavenging parts from the things around the house for their first projects. But, with money and more ambitious builds comes the need to purchase parts off the shelf. There is, however, something to be said for the ingenuity that comes with building something solely with scavenged parts, and that’s what [Evan Booth] decided to do, in a spectacular fashion.

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Robot Cheerleader Just Needs A Hand To Learn Basic Tricks

May 13, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 13 Comments

This robot may have the fastest hand we’ve ever seen. It’s only a hand at the moment, but it’s certainly good with it.

The hand comes from a research project out of the University of Washington. The researchers didn’t just want to program the robot to do tricks, they wanted it to learn. Some tasks are just by nature too complex and tedious to program all the details for. Look at all those tendon activators. You want to program that?

The current focus of the robot is twirling a stick. While they’re probably a ways away from a robot cheerleading squad or robot drum major, the task itself is extremely difficult. This can be proven by just how many YouTube videos there are on the art of pencil twirling.

While the video didn’t show the robot dramatically twirling the stick at high speed, it did show the robot rotating it a little bit without dropping it. And this is a behavior that it has learned. For anyone who has ever had a run-in with robotics, or the art of convincing a robot not to discard all the data it collects in order to not run directly into a wall, this is a pretty big achievement. Video after the break.

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Pipe In (Robot) Hand

March 25, 2016 by Al Williams 5 Comments

How do you make a robot hand? If you are [Robimek], you start with some plastic spiral tubing, some servo motors, and some fishing line. Oh, and you also need an old glove.

The spiral tubing (or pipe, if you prefer) is cut in a hand-like shape and fused together with adhesive. The knuckle joints are cut out to allow the tubing to flex at that point. The fishing line connects the fingertips to the servo motors.

The project uses an Arduino to drive the servos, although you could do the job with any microcontroller. Winding up the fishing line contracts the associated finger. Reeling it out lets the springy plastic pipe pull back to its original position.The glove covers the pipes and adds a realistic look to the hand.
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Hardware Store Robot Hand

June 3, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

hardware-store-robot-hand

Here’s a robot hand which can be built using mostly hardware store items. It doesn’t have the strongest of grips, but it does have lifelike movement. The demonstration video shows it picking up small objects like a metal nut.

The image above shows the ring and pinky fingers of the hand beginning to flex. These are controlled by the servo motors mounted in the palm area. The skeletal structure of each digit begins with the links of a bicycle chain. The links are first separated by removing the friction fit rods. Each rod is replaced with a screw and a nut, which also allows the springs (which open the digits) to be anchored at each ‘knuckle’.

[Aaron Thomen] didn’t stop the design process once the hand was finished. He went on to build a controller which lets you pull some rings with your fingers to affect movement. This movement is measured by a set of potentiometers and translated into electrical signals to position the hand’s servo motors. The demo, as well as two how-to videos are embedded below.

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