Stop The Machine-on-Machine Violence!

We’re not sure we condone this at all. CRT monitors are virtually extinct, and here we have some folks just smashing them up for no good reason. That said, it’s kinda cool to see large industrial robots in motion, so we can’t really blame them. (Video embedded below.)

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We’ve covered the [Geek Group] crushing TVs with their robot arm before although that first try was more like a fail, in the sense that the TV was only partly smashed. At the time, we joked that it was because they had a Jolly Wrencher holding the CRT together. But it could have been that the robot arm simply lacked the requisite grunt.

This time they came to it with a stronger robot arm, and removed the Jolly Wrencher from the screens. These folks aren’t scientists — changing two variables at once leaves the experiment inconclusive. But they do smash things. So that’s a success, right?

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Carbon fiber weaving robot!

Hackaday Prize Entry: Weaving Carbon Fiber With Industrial Robots

Oh to have a 6-axis robot arm to play with… For [Basia Dzaman’s] final graduation project for School of Form, she designed and 3D printed an end effect tool for an industrial KUKA robot — for weaving carbon fiber.

Through an iterative design process, she developed many prototypes of the tool until the one you see above. It’s capable of holding a Dremel multi tool which can be used to drill into a work surface for installing pegs which make up the custom weaving jig. The pegs (nails) are then installed by hand so that the robot can thread carbon fiber — fed through an epoxy bath as it is dispensed — onto the jig. In the example, she shows a traditional Polish handcraft called Snutki (a type of stitching), wrapping the carbon fiber in patterns around the pegs. Once the epoxy cures, a strong structure can be removed.

Remember the 6-axis robot that can 3D print in metal, and is currently working on 3D printing a bridge? [Basia’s] design could do similar things, for a completely different industry. You can check out [Basia]’s video for the project below.

The 2015 Hackaday Prize is sponsored by:

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