Foldable PCB Becomes Tiny Rover

March 30, 2023 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Typically, when you’re putting electronics in a robot, you install the various controller PCBs into the robot’s chassis. But what if the PCB itself was the chassis? [Carl Bugeja’s] latest design explores just that idea.

Yes, [Carl] decided to build a tiny robotic rover out of a foldable PCB. This choice was made as using a flexible foldable PCB would allow for the creation of a 3D chassis without the need for bulky connectors joining several boards together. A key part of the design was allowing the structure to unfold easily for serviceability’s sake. To that end, the structure is held together by the bolts that also act as the axles for the rover’s wheels. Even more brilliantly, the wheels are turned by motors built into the very PCB itself. Control is via a PlayStation controller, connected wirelessly to command the robot.

The little bot is surprisingly capable, especially when juiced up with a twin-cell lithium battery. It’s tiny, with minimal ground clearance, so it’s not the best at driving on rough surfaces. Having all-wheel-drive helps, though.

[Carl] specifically credits Altium Designer for making the design possible, thanks to its advanced 3D visualization tools that support foldable PCBs. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Foldable PCB Becomes Tiny Rover” →

Robot 3D Prints Giant Metal Parts With Induction Heat

March 29, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 36 Comments

While our desktop machines are largely limited to various types of plastic, 3D printing in other materials offers unique benefits. For example, printing with concrete makes it possible to quickly build houses, and we’ve even seen things like sugar laid down layer by layer into edible prints. Metals are often challenging to print with due to its high melting temperatures, though, and while this has often been solved with lasers a new method uses induction heating to deposit the metals instead.

A company in Arizona called Rosotics has developed a large-scale printer based on this this method that they’re calling the Mantis. It uses three robotic arms to lay down metal prints of remarkable size, around eight meters wide and six meters tall. It can churn through about 50 kg of metal per hour, and can be run off of a standard 240 V outlet. The company is focusing on aerospace applications, with rendered rocket components that remind us of what Relativity Space is working on.

Nothing inspires confidence like a low-quality render.

The induction heating method for the feedstock not only means they can avoid using power-hungry and complex lasers to sinter powdered metal, a material expensive in its own right, but they can use more common metal wire feedstock instead. In addition to being cheaper and easier to work with, wire is also safer. Rosotics points out that some materials used in traditional laser sintering, such as powdered titanium, are actually explosive.

Of course, the elephant in the room is that Relativity recently launched a 33 meter (110 foot) tall 3D printed rocket over the Kármán line — while Rosotics hasn’t even provided a picture of what a component printed with their technology looks like. Rather than being open about their position in the market, the quotes from CEO Christian LaRosa make it seem like he’s blissfully unaware his fledgling company is already on the back foot.

If you’ve got some rocket propellant tanks you’d like printed, the company says they’ll start taking orders in October. Though you’ll need to come up with a $95,000 deposit before they’ll start the work. If you’re looking for something a little more affordable, it’s possible to convert a MIG welder into a rudimentary metal 3D printer instead.

Caterpillar-Like Soft Robot With Distributed Programmable Thermal Actuation

March 26, 2023 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a soft robot that moves in a distinctly caterpillar-like manner. As detailed in the research paper in Science Advances by [Shuang Wu] and colleagues, the robot they developed consists of a layer of liquid crystalline elastomers (LCE) and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with embedded silver nanowire that acts as a heater.

The LCE is hereby designed as a thermal bimorph actuator, using a distinct thermal expansion coefficient between the LCE and PDMS sides to create a highly controllable deformation and thus motion. Since the nanowire is divided into sections that can be individually heated, the exact deformation can be quite tightly controlled, enabling the crawling motion.

(A) Schematics of the forward locomotion of a caterpillar. (B) Schematics of the reverse locomotion of a caterpillar. (C) Snapshots of the crawling robot in one cycle of actuation for reverse locomotion. (D) Snapshots of the crawling robot in one cycle of actuation for forward locomotion. (E) infrared image of the crawling robot with 0.05-A current injected in channel 1 and the tilted view of the crawling robot. (F) Infrared image of the crawling robot with 30-mA current injected in channel 2 and the corresponding tilted view of the crawling robot. (Credit: Shuang Wu, et al. (2023))

As can be seen in the video below, the motion is fairly rapid and quite efficient, as well as decidedly caterpillar-like. Although the current prototype uses external control wires that supply the current, it might be possible to integrate a power supply and control circuitry in a stand-alone robot. Since the heater works on low voltage (5 V) and relatively little power is required, this would seem to make stand-alone operation eminently possible.

Continue reading “Caterpillar-Like Soft Robot With Distributed Programmable Thermal Actuation” →

Single Flex PCB Folds Into A Four-Wheel Rover, Complete With Motors

March 25, 2023 by Dan Maloney 3 Comments

You’ve got to hand it to [Carl Bugeja] — he comes up with some of the most interesting electromechanical designs we’ve seen. His latest project is right up there, too: a single PCB that folds up into a four-wheel motorized rover.

The key to [Carl]’s design lies with his PCB brushless motors, which he has been refining since we first spotted them back in 2018. The idea is to use traces on the PCB for the stator coils to drive a 3D printed rotor containing tiny magnets. They work surprisingly well, even if they don’t generate a huge amount of torque. [Carl]’s flexible PCB design, which incorporates metal stiffeners, is a bit like an unfolded cardboard box, with two pairs of motor coils on each of the side panels. This leaves the other surfaces available for all the electronics, with includes a PIC, a driver chip, and a Hall sensor for each motor, an IMU and proximity sensor for navigation, and an ESP32 to run the show.

With machined aluminum rotors and TPU tires mounted to the folded-up chassis, it was off to the races, albeit slowly. The lack of torque from the motors and the light weight of the rover, along with some unwanted friction due to ill-fitting joints, added up to slow progress, especially on anything other than a dead flat surface. But with some tweaking, [Carl] was able to get the buggy working well enough to call this one a win. Check out the build and testing in the video below.

Knowing [Carl], this isn’t the last we’ll see of the foldable rover. After all, he stuck with his two-wheel PCB motor design and eventually got that running pretty well. We’ll be keeping an eye out for progress on this one.

Continue reading “Single Flex PCB Folds Into A Four-Wheel Rover, Complete With Motors” →

Retro Gadgets: Nintendo R.O.B Wanted To Be Your Friend

February 16, 2023 by Al Williams 20 Comments

Too busy playing video games to have a social life? No worries. In 1985, Nintendo introduced R.O.B. — otherwise known as the Robotic Operating Buddy. It was made to play Nintendo with you. In Japan, apparently, it was the Family Computer Robot. We suppose ROB isn’t a very Japanese name. The robot was in response to the video game market crash of 1983 and was meant to keep the new Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from being classified as a video game, which would have been a death sentence at the time of its release.

Since you might not have heard of R.O.B., you can probably guess it didn’t work out very well. In fact, the whole thing tanked in two years and resulted in only two games.

Continue reading “Retro Gadgets: Nintendo R.O.B Wanted To Be Your Friend” →

Does Programming A Robot With ChatGPT Work At All?

February 9, 2023 by Lewin Day 41 Comments

ChatGPT has been put to all manner of silly uses since it first became available online. [Engineering After Hours] decided to see if its coding skills were any chop, and put it to work programming a circular saw. Pun intended.

The aim was to build a line following robot armed with a circular saw to handle lawn edging tasks. The circular saw itself consists of a motor with a blade on it, and precisely no safety features. It’s mounted on the front of a small RC car with a rack and pinion to control its position. [Engineering After Hours] has some sage advice in this area: don’t try this at home.

ChatGPT was not only able to give advice on what parts to use, it was able to tell [Engineering After Hours] on how to hook everything up to an Arduino and even write the code. The AI language model even recommended a PID loop to control the position of the circular saw. Initial tests were messy, but some refinement got things impressively functional.

As a line following robot, the performance is pretty crummy. However, as a robot programmed by an AI, it does pretty okay. Obviously, it’s hard to say how much help the AI had, and how many corrections [Engineering After Hours] had to make to the code to get everything working. But the fact that this kind of project is even possible shows us just how far AI has really come.

Continue reading “Does Programming A Robot With ChatGPT Work At All?” →

Robot Collects Ping Pong Balls For You

January 21, 2023 by Lewin Day 9 Comments

If you’ve ever played ping pong, table tennis, or beer pong, you know that it’s a struggle to hang on to the balls. [MaximeMonsieur] has designed a robot to handle picking them up so you don’t have to.

The robot is specifically designed to pick up ultra-light ping pong balls. To that end, it has a large spinning paddle that simply wafts the balls into its collector basket at the rear. The robot gets around with a simple two-motor drive system, relying on skid-steering with a castor wheel at the rear. An Arduino Uno runs the show, and navigates the robot around with the aid of ultrasonic sensors to avoid crashing into walls.

Overall, the robot shows the benefits of designing for a specific purpose. Such a design would likely be far less successful with other types of heavier balls, but for ping pong balls, the spinning paddle collector works great. We can imagine the robot being put to good use between sets to pick up all the lost balls around a table tennis court.

We’ve seen other ball collecting robots before, too.

Continue reading “Robot Collects Ping Pong Balls For You” →