[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt3sPV5mzgM%5D
Here is a nice video to wind down the day. It’s [neorazz]’s micRo playing the theme from Tetris. The micRo is a simple CNC kit sold by the team at Lumenlabs. For more servo music, peruse our CNC category.
[Thanks grayson]
This antenna tuner is controlled remotely using geared motors and legos. The tuner needed to be closer to the antenna for performance reasons. This created a problem; most of the radio gear is inside while the tuner is outside. The gear motors and Legos combine to form a closed loop servo, operating two air core caps and an inductor switch. A control box placed near the radio is hard wired to the modded tuner outside. We would like to see something like this under gesture control using the Wii MotionPlus + Arduino.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QReb1hLfdbE]
Stairs are one of the most commonly faced mobility challenges for a robot. This robot’s design eliminates the need for a complex drive train or computer, and instead uses a clever mechanical design to climb stairs. Version three of the robot uses five servos modified for continuous rotation, a Picaxe28, sharp IR sensors, and bump sensors.
[via BotJunkie]
[Oomlout] has created an Arduino Experimentation Kit that uses basic sensors, buttons, and LEDs to teach electronics and programming. Printed overlays are secured on a breadboard, indicating components and connections. The Arduino is then used to drive the circuit. Examples include driving motors, using shift registers, and making beeps with a piezo element. These are backed up by explanations and code. The breadboarding kit is very similar to the classic 300-in-1 project kits marketed to beginners. In addition, all of the materials are released as open source. Kits are also available that include everything needed to create the circuits.
Related: Opensource Robotic Arm
[via Hack a Day flickr pool]
The latest version of the Arduino software allows you to use more than two servos at a time. Curious Inventor has posted a demo showing how to run 4 servos from a keyboard input. The code should also work just fine on Arduino clones, like the Roboduino pictured above. They point out that if you are running version 12 of the software, some manual additions will be necessary.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0hBCdMJ96g]
If you are interested in trying out some home automation, but don’t want to get into the potentially dangerous area of hacking your house wiring, consider these servo switches. These allow you to flip a switch, using a servo. They are clean, temporary, and fairly compact. You can purchase them at oomlout.com or download the designs and build your own.
Kit builder oomlout—we’ve featured their servo bot—needed to produce a lot of precut wires. After cutting and stripping more than their fair share, they decided to apply some heavy engineering to make things easier. They constructed a machine to do the job for them. It has three main components: a servo driven wire feeder to measure the length, a two servo wire stripper that uses an exacto blade, and finally a wire cutter made from snips and a drill motor. The machine is controlled using an Arduino. They’ve published all the plans and code to Thingiverse incase anyone else wants to build a similar machine for their own kit shop. A video of the machine is embedded below.
