robot

1033 Articles

It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, No… It’s High Voltage EPROM Man!

January 26, 2016 by 29 Comments

At Hackaday, we cover some pretty high-tech builds. Sometimes, though, you see something simple, but it still makes you feel happy to see it. That’s pretty much the case with [ProtoG’s] High Voltage EPROM Man.

The parts probably came out of a junk box, but the good news is that they don’t have to work, and you can freely substitute anything you have. According to [ProtoG], the “robot” head is a bulb socket with a crystal for the visor. The arms are fuses with fuse clips for the hands. The knees are adjustable caps, and the feet are TO-220 transistors.

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Robots And Crickets

January 20, 2016 by 18 Comments

If you watch science fiction movies, the robots of the future look like us. The truth is, though, many tasks go better when robots don’t look like us. Sometimes they are unique to a particular job or sometimes it is useful to draw inspiration from something other than a human being. One professor at Johns Hopkins along with some students decided to look at spider crickets as an inspiration for a new breed of jumping robots.

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Robotic Suitcase Follows You Around

January 15, 2016 by 64 Comments

I have something that follows me around all the time: my dog Jasper. His cargo-carrying capability is limited, though, and he requires occasional treats. Not so this robotic suitcase. All it needs, the designers claim, is an occasional charge and a Bluetooth device to follow.

Designed by NUA Robotics, this suitcase is equipped with powered wheels and a certain amount of smarts: enough to figure out the direction of a Bluetooth signal such as your cell phone and follow it. This is also accompanied by proximity sensors so it doesn’t bump into you or other people. When the built-in battery runs out, just pop put the handle and pull it yourself, and the regenerative motors will recharge the battery. There’s no indication on price, battery life or how much space is left to actually carry stuff yet, but the designers claim it could be out within the year. As someone who uses a walking stick, this sounds like a great idea. And if they can work out how to get it to walk the dog for me, that would be even better.

Now, who will be the first to build a clone of this in their basement? Bonus points if it’s a two-wheeled self-balancer.

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Crappy Robots And Even Crappier Electronics Kits

January 12, 2016 by 35 Comments

Robots and DIY electronics kits have a long history together. There probably isn’t anyone under the age of forty that hasn’t had some experience with kit-based robots like wall-hugging mouse robots, a weird walking robot on stilts, or something else from the 1987 American Science and Surplus catalog. DIY robot kits are still big business, and walking through the sales booths of any big Maker Faire will show the same ideas reinvented again and again.

[demux] got his hands on what is possibly the worst DIY electronics kit in existence. It’s so incredibly bad that it ends up being extremely educational; pick up one of these ‘introduction to electronics’ kits, and you’ll end up learning advanced concepts like PCB rework, reverse engineering, and Mandarin.

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Beer Kegs Make Excellent Resin Dispensers

December 26, 2015 by 18 Comments

[Josh Updyke] woke up one morning and found himself in a sticky situation. The demand for his modular robotic track system was outgrowing his ability to produce. One of the bottlenecks was weighing out resin. It’s a slow, monotonous process that must be done with accuracy. The free market did not have any affordable solutions to the problem. So like any hacker worth his weight in 2N2222 transistors, he made his own by re-purposing some used beer kegs.

The resin comes in two parts – the resin itself and a hardener. Each must be weighted out on a scale before mixing to ensure proper proportions. It was a trial-by-error learning process before [Josh] was able to settle on a final solution. First he tried some garden sprayers, which worked OK at first. But the resin was taking too long to exit the sprayers, and he had to pressurize them by manually pumping them with air. He ended up with a much better method that used some Cornelius Kegs.

Be sure to check out his io page for more details.

3D Printed Hydraulics

December 20, 2015 by 37 Comments

[Robert MacCurdy] at MIT wants to change how people think about hydraulics. Using fluid can be very useful in systems like robots, but it is often the case that the tubing that carries hydraulic fluid is not an integrated part of the overall design. [MacCurdy] and his colleagues have modified a 3D printer to allow it directly include hydraulic components as it prints.

The idea is simple. The team started with a printer that uses a liquid ink that is UV cured to produce solid layers. The printer has the ability to use multiple liquids, and [MacCurdy] uses hydraulic fluid (that does not UV cure) as one of the print materials. Just as you can use a 3D printer to build structures within other structures, printing the hydraulics allows for complex closed systems that use the UV-cured resin as mechanical parts that can transfer pressure to and from the hydraulic system.

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Robot Listens To Commands–Literally

December 10, 2015 by 14 Comments

Where you might see a can, [Adam Kumpf] sees a robot. [Adam’s] robot (named [Canny]) doesn’t move around, but it does have expressive eyebrows, multicolored eyes, and a speaker for a mouth. What makes it interesting, though, is the fact that it receives audio commands via the headphones it wears. You can see [Canny] in action in the video below.

The headphones couple audio tones to [Canny’s] microphone using AFSK (audio frequency shift keying). [Canny] uses an opamp to bring the microphone level up and then uses a 567 PLL IC to decode the audio tones. [Adam] selected two clever frequencies for the mark and space (12345 Hz and 9876 Hz). In addition to being numerically entertaining, the frequencies are far enough apart to be easy to detect, pass through the headphones with no problem, and are not harmonically related.

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