Krave Antweight Robot Gets Eaten And Stays Alive

August 17, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 8 Comments

The battle’s are done and the results are in — [AltaPowderDog]’s, aka [Carter Hurd], cardboard and foam armor, lightweight Krave robot beat its metal cousins in 2016 and fared well in 2017. How did a cardboard Krave cereal box and foam board robot do that you ask? The cardboard and foam outer structure was sliced, smashed and generally eaten while the delicate electronics, motors and wheels remained buried safely inside.

We covered the making of his 2016 version but didn’t follow-up with how it fared in that year’s Illinois Bot Brawl competition. As you can see in the exciting first video below, despite suffering repeated severe damage to its armor, it won first place in the 1 lb Antweight category!

Battery and RC receiver

Wheels, motors and speed controller

Finished Krave robot

For 2017 he made another one but managed to halve the weight — and so he made two of them! By starting them both within a twelve-inch by twelve-inch area, they were allowed to fight as a team. How did he make it lighter? Partly it was done by doing away with the ability to lift the metal lip in front, the wheels were reduced from four to two, and a smaller servo was used for opening and closing the mouth. The full build video is shown below along with a video of the 2017 battles wherein he won seventh place.

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Simple Step-Climbing Robot Climbs Like It’s On Mars

August 12, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 16 Comments

[Navin Khambhala] is a master at making simple what most would expect to be a complex build. Now he’s done it again with a remote controlled robot that can easily climb steps and role over rough terrain. The parts count is small and many of them are commonly available.

The suspension that makes it all possible is the rocker-bogie. It’s the same suspension we’ve all seen used by the various rovers ambling around on Mars. The whole frame is made of PVC pipes with some connecting metal bars, and each wheel has its own twelve-volt DC motor. Motor control is done simply with a module that combines the 2.4 GHz receiver with motor controllers. When you watch the video below, note where only one hole is drilled through the PVC for making connections instead of two holes. Where there’s only one hole, the two sections of PVC are free to rotate independently of each other. Turning the robot is done by rotating the wheels on one side in one direction and the wheels on the other side in the opposite direction. This is called a differential drive or tank drive, and we’ve highlighted it before for use in making hamster-drive type BB-8 droids.

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Hackaday Prize Best Product Finalist: Reconfigurable Robots

August 12, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 2 Comments

Reconfigurable robots have been around for ages. One of the first and most popular reconfigurable robots came out of the MIT Media Lab, and last year, DTTO, a modular snake-like robot, won the 2016 Hackaday Prize. There’s a lot that can be learned from a robot that can turn from a walker to a swimmer to something that clambers over rough terrain, and [Salvador]’s EMME does just that. It’s a 3D printed robot and controller that’s the closest you can get to, ‘the Lego of robots’. All you need to do is plug some wheels into a controller and you’re off to the races.

[Salvador]’s EMME is a brilliant little robot that’s only made of a few generic parts. These parts snap together or join with magnets to turn into any device you can imagine that somehow turns rotation of a wheel into linear motion. All the parts are 3D printed, work without cables or connectors, and the robot itself is controlled by a wireless gem-shaped 3D printed controller.

Already, [Salvador] has on-road wheels for EMME, off-road wheels, above-water wheels, and submersible accessories. This is already an all-terrain robot that’s easy to put together and easy to control, but [Salvador] isn’t done yet. he’s working on new hardware based on the ESP32 and working on the vast amount of documentation required for a robot that can do anything.

You can check out [Salvador]’s pitch video for EMME below.

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Wooden Domino Laying Machine

August 12, 2017 by Steven Dufresne 17 Comments

[Matthias Wandel] has come up with another awesome machine, this time a machine that sets up neat rows of dominos. If you’ve followed [Matthias]’s work over the years then you’ll know that this is a wooden version of one he made out of LEGO® back in 2009.

In true [Matthias] fashion he uses just the one motor both for moving the machine along and for pushing the dominos in place. Not satisfied with that efficient use of parts, the rubber band belts that transfer rotation from the motor shaft to the wheels (bearings) double as the rubber surfaces for those wheels. One of many joys from watching [Matthias] work is seeing how he forms wood into shapes that most people would have trouble sculpting from clay. In this case he does this when he needs parts for reaching over his domino magazine to hold a guide rail in place, and of course the parts are well-rounded and clean-looking.

You might also ask, where did he get all the wooden blocks for dominos? He made them of course, all 300 or so.

Be sure to check out the video below of both the build, and of it in action.

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Hackaday Prize Entry: A Six Axis Robotic Arm With Fingertip Control

August 4, 2017 by Jenny List 3 Comments

If you were a child of the 1980s whose fascination extended to the contents of your local Radio Shack store, you may remember the Armatron robot arm as a particular object of desire. It was a table top robot arm operated not by motors or a microcontroller, but by a clever set of gears directed manually from a pair of joysticks. If you took a look at it with an eye to control from your 8-bit home computer you were likely to be disappointed, but nevertheless it was an excellent toy.

The Armatron may be long gone, but if you hanker for a similar device you should take a look at [3D Meister]’s finger controlled six axis arm. This is an arm similar to the Armatron in size, but with far more capabilities. Control is via cable loops to sliders at the arm’s base, and in addition to the usual arm movements there is an extra loop which can be used to operate any of a selection of tools including a gripper, a magnet, and a clipper. The video below the break shows the arm in action, and for the faint-hearted it should be noted that it contains the gratuitous death of some innocent plants.

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Autonomous Boat Sails The High Seas

July 30, 2017 by Bryan Cockfield 13 Comments

As the human population continues to rise and the amount of industry increases, almost no part of the globe feels the burdens of this activity more than the oceans. Whether it’s temperature change, oxygen or carbon dioxide content, or other characteristics, the study of the oceans will continue to be an ongoing scientific endeavor. The one main issue, though, is just how big the oceans really are. To study them in-depth will require robots, and for that reason [Mike] has created an autonomous boat.

This boat is designed to be 3D printed in sections, making it easily achievable for anyone with access to a normal-sized printer. The boat uses the uses the APM autopilot system and Rover firmware making it completely autonomous. Waypoints can be programmed in, and the boat will putter along to its next destination and perform whatever tasks it has been instructed. The computer is based on an ESP module, and the vessel has a generously sized payload bay.

While the size of the boat probably limits its ability to cross the Pacific anytime soon, it’s a good platform for other bodies of water and potentially a building block for larger ocean-worthy ships that might have an amateur community behind them in the future. In fact, non-powered vessels that sail the high seas are already a reality.

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PobDuino Makes The Most Of Grove

July 27, 2017 by John Baichtal 1 Comment

The chassis of a toy robot serves as the base of a robot built by [Jean Noel]. Called #PobDuino, the robot features two Arduino-compatible boards under the hood.

First, a Seeeduino Lotus, a Arduino board peppered with a dozen Grove-compatible sockets. The board, which is the size of an UNO, is mounted so that the plugs project out of the front of the robot, allowing ad-hoc experimentation with the various Grove System modules. Meanwhile, a custom ATmega328 board (the PobDuino) interprets Flowcode instructions and sends commands to the various parts of the robot: servos are controlled by an Adafruit servo driver board and the DC motors are driven by a Grove I2C motor driver.

We love how easy it is to customize the robot, with both the Lotus and the Adafruit 16-channel servo driver on the exterior of the robot. Just plug and play!

Learn more about Grove-compatible plugs and a lot more in [Elliot]’s My Life in the Connector Zoo.