robot

1027 Articles

Hackaday Links: March 25, 2013

March 25, 2013 by 38 Comments

Illegal, yet impressive

cans

Want a soda? Just grab a robot, shove it in a vending machine, and grab yourself one. This video is incredibly French, but it looks like we’ve got a custom-built robot made out of old printers and other miscellaneous motors and gears here. It’s actually pretty impressive when you consider 16 ounce cans weigh a pound.

UNOBTANIUM

chip

Okay, we got a lot of emails on our tip line for this one. It’s a group buy for a programmable oscillator over on Tindie. Why is this cool? Well, this chip (an SI570) is used in a lot of software defined radio designs. Also, it’s incredibly hard to come by if you’re not ordering thousands of these at a time. Here’s a datasheet, now show us some builds with this oscillator.

Chiptune/keygen music anywhere

keygen

[Huan] has a co-loco’d Raspi and wanted a media server that is available anywhere, on any device. What he came up with is a service that streams chiptune music from your favorite keygens. You can access it with Chrome (no, we’re not linking directly to a Raspberry Pi), and it’s extremely efficient – his RAM usage didn’t increase a bit.

Take it on an airplane. Or mail it.

bomb

[Alex]’s hackerspace just had a series of lightning talks, where people with 45-minute long presentations try to condense their talk into 10 minutes. Of course the hackerspace needed some way to keep everything on schedule. A simple countdown timer was too boring, so they went with a fake, Hollywood-style bomb. No, it doesn’t explode, but it still looks really, really fake. That’s a good thing.

Printers have speakers now?

nokia

[ddrboxman] thought his reprap needed a nice ‘print finished’ notification. After adding a piezo to his electronics board, he whipped up a firmware hack that plays those old Nokia ringtones. The ringtones play over Gcode, so it’s possible to have audible warnings and notifications. Now if it could only play Snake.

Robotic Rat Torments And Depresses Real Rats

March 18, 2013 by 92 Comments

robotic-rat-torments-real-rats

Animal testing has always been a subject of much debate. On one hand, it allows us to determine if something is probably safe for humans. On the other hand, it’s injuring and killing the very animals that help us escape that same fate. Any way you look at it, be thankful you’re not a lab rat. Being a mammal, they share a similar physiology with us. They are also easy to breed and easy to dispose of. These characteristics make them the prime subject for testing the safety of drugs and treatments that might one day be used on humans. Scientists at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, have created a new rat nemesis – the WR-3, a robot designed specifically to stress and depress lab animals in the name of science.

Depression isn’t normally something rats have to worry about in the wild. So, the WR-3 tries to instill it upon them. The robot has three functions: attacking continuously (relentlessly rams the victim), attacking interactively (attacks for 5 seconds whenever the victim moves, then stops), and chasing (stays right next to the victim but never attacks). The scientists found that the best way to make the rats depressed was to attack them continuously in their youth, then attack interactively as they get older.

With the data the scientists gain from these new experiments, they hope to learn more about human depression and hopefully come up with more successful treatments. There isn’t a lot of specific information we could find about the WR-3, but we’ll keep you posted.

[via Gizmodo]

SCARA Arm Finally Prints Plastic Parts

February 25, 2013 by 24 Comments

SCARA

Here’s a neat alternative to the usual gantry setup you see on 3D printers. [Quentin] designed and build a SCARA arm 3D printer that just saw its first print.

We caught wind of [Quentin]’s SCARA arm a few weeks ago when it was still just a few plastic parts and a glimmer of ambition in its creator’s eye. Most of the parts are 3D printed, including the blue arms for the x and y axes that are driven by stepper motors. The z axis is controlled by two lead screws, and judging by the height of [Quentin]’s machine, he has a pretty big printable volume – at least as large as some of the delta bot 3D printers we’ve seen.

So far [Quentin] has printed a handful of calibration cubes and a wheel with a fairly impressive print resolution. You can check out a video of the SCARA arm printer after the break.

Continue reading “SCARA Arm Finally Prints Plastic Parts” →

An Awesome, Futuristic, All-in-one Robot Chassis

February 15, 2013 by 41 Comments

bot

No matter how many advances in electronics we find, we’re constantly surprised at the lack of progress in robot chassis. Sure, it should be a simple task to make a capable robot that looks cool, but aside from the Veter project team, no one else seems to be advancing the state of robot mechanics.

We’ve seen robotic chassis and hardware from the Veter team before, and this new version brings a whole lot more to the table. While the camera. GPS, compass, and ultrasonic sensors are the same from the previous build, there’s a whole lot more software inspired by [Sebastian Thrun]’s autonomous car class to make this build a little more capable.

While the Veter team is using a Beagleboard for their on-board computer, it should be possible to change the hardware over to a more economical Raspberry Pi. Even then, it won’t be a cheap build, but we doubt you’ll find a better robotics platform for less.

Robot Has Rhythm; Carries Drum Sticks

January 8, 2013 by 15 Comments

This little robot needs to go on the road with the Blue Man Group. The treaded rover carries its own drum sticks and uses random objects as its drum set.

We admit that this is not a fresh hack. It harkens from 2008 but this is the first time we can remember seeing the little guy. After viewing the video embedded after the jump we think you’ll agree the project deserves to be seen by as many aspiring hardware hackers as possible.

Perched atop the pile is a speaker, with a second hidden between the yellow treads. The lower unit lets the PICAX 28 microcontroller produce beeps and pops, while the upper unit provides a background track for the drumming. The two rods extending above the ultrasonic rangefinder are connected to a couple of motors and drum along with a third stick that looks like a tail. Even the servo that sweeps the rangefinder from side to side keeps the beat. The synchronized magic is all in the code, which you can get your hands on in step 11 of this longer build tutorial.

Continue reading “Robot Has Rhythm; Carries Drum Sticks” →

Brute Forcing A GPS PIN

January 5, 2013 by 120 Comments

pin

[JJ] picked up a Garmin Nuvi 780 GPS from an auction recently. One of the more frustrating features [JJ] ran into is it’s PIN code; this GPS can’t be unlocked unless a four-digit code is entered, or it’s taken to a ‘safe location’. Not wanting to let his auction windfall go to waste, [JJ] rigged up an automated brute force cracking robot to unlock this GPS.

The robot is built around an old HP scanner and a DVD drive sled to move the GPS in the X and Y axes. A clever little device made out of an eraser tip and a servo taps out every code from 0000 to 9999 and waits a bit to see if the device unlocks. It takes around 8 seconds for [JJ]’s robot to enter a single code, so entering all 10,000 PINs will take about a day and a half.

Fortunately, the people who enter these codes don’t care too much about the security of their GPS devices. The code used to unlock [JJ]’s GPS was 0248. It only took a couple of hours for the robot to enter the right code; we’d call that time well spent.

You can check out the brute force robot in action after the break.

Continue reading “Brute Forcing A GPS PIN” →

Building A Rather Rudimentary Arduino Tank Bot

January 3, 2013 by 7 Comments

building-an-arduino-tankbot

The tank robot builds that we see are often quite complex. This lets them do great things, but makes the platform scary for beginners. Here’s a tank build that would be a great first project, especially if you’re more interested in the programming side of robotics than you are in the hardware itself. [Paul Bleisch] combined several different commercially available products to fabricate this Arduino-powered tank robot base.

Locomotion is provided by a double geared-motor module. This unit, the plastic wheels and treads, as well as the wooden mounting platform are all made by Tamiya. They cost very little and are already designed to work with one another. To this base he adds the Arduino and a motor shield which makes the connections dead simple. The black case on one end of the chassis holds four AA batteries which provide power for everything.

These components are all that’s really needed to start, but they provide no interactivity. So [Paul] picked up a used wireless PlayStation 2 controller. There’s a library (written by regular reader [Bill Porter]) that allows him to connect the receiver to the Arduino in order to pick up commands from the controller. He also plans to add an ultrasonic range finder to the build sometime in the future.

If you’re don’t need to do things the easy way you should consider fabricating your own tank treads.