Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher

March 6, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 10 Comments

If you’ve gone to a local city park lately, you might have noticed strange metal baskets on poles with chains dangling free. These baskets are spread out throughout the park seemingly at random. For the uninitiated, Frisbee golf (sometimes known as disc golf) is a confusing concept. You might not think it, but Frisbee golf can be a very big deal to some people. [Stuff Made Here] is back with a disc launcher that he hopes will put all the disc golfers to shame.

It’s no secret that we here at Hackaday are big fans of [Stuff Made Here], or [Shane] (he has his own tag after all), and for obvious reasons — the CAD design process, the careful machining and testing, and the extremely high bar that [Shane] sets for his projects. This one is no different, and it is a tale of iteration and scaling. He started out with a simple goal: break the speed record for a thrown Frisbee.

An initial design was decided upon based on high-pressure air pushing a piston to throw the Frisbee off of an arm. Initially, the arm was way too slow as the airflow was severely restricted due to air solenoids and pressure regulators. After fixing all those problems by fabricating his own solenoid and adding a secondary tank with no regulator, the arm started really moving. However, [Shane] wanted it to be able to be arm-mounted, so making sure the torque wouldn’t melt his arm bones was an important priority.

A counterbalance was added to cancel it out, but that ended up causing additional problems down the road, so the throwing arm had to be made as light as possible. The gripper mechanism had to be redesigned again and again as each time the speed was increased, a new problem arose. Turns out that small plastic discs being accelerated at many G’s tend to deform and slip out of their holders, no matter how well engineered. So [Shane] switched to a clever new design to pull the Frisbee along rather than push. It was too dangerous to really be handheld, and the only tests while he was wearing it were at very low amounts of pressure and power.

Testing it in a wide-open field at full power showed promise and while he had plenty of speed, he wasn’t able to beat the distance record. Breaking the distance record is much harder as Frisbees aren’t really designed with the sheer acceleration that [Shane] is subjecting them to, and they want to flip. Additionally, the Frisbees are lacking the spin that would keep them more stable, and what we do as humans is quite difficult to reproduce. Maybe a larger-scale version of this disc launcher could be made that accepts Frisbees?

It’s incredible to watch this contraption come together as each part needs to be designed and machined first by [Shane]. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Putting The ‘Go’ In Frisbee Golf With A Robot Launcher” →

Building An Archery Mech Suit To Skip Practice

August 19, 2021 by Danie Conradie 8 Comments

According to legend, King Edward III once said: “If you want to train a longbowman, start with his grandfather.” Consistently making accurate hits with any bow, especially on moving targets, takes many hours of practice. Or, if you’re [Shane Wighton], you can spend a comparable amount of time building, debugging, and rebuilding a robotically-enhanced bow to do it.

The goal was to shoot flying targets out of the air, so [Shane] had to create a system that could track the position of the bow and the target, and automatically adjust the position of the bow and loose the arrow at exactly the right moment to intercept the target. The position tracking was done with the same Optitrack cameras [Shane] used on his robotic basketball hoop, with reflective marking balls on the bow, target, and the release mechanism. The auto-aiming is done with a two-axis rack and pinion mechanism driven by a pair of stepper motors. [Shane] first used the cheapest recurve bow he could find online, which caused accuracy issues likely related to the Archer’s paradox. The setup also made him repeatedly hit himself in the face, because the servo-operated release mechanism would release unexpectedly without having a proper anchor with his draw hand.

[Shane] eventually upgraded to a compound bow, which reduced the tension he had to hold while lining up the shot, but also increased the weight of the system dramatically. This leads him to fully embrace the mech suit look, and use a Steadicam vest to hold the weight of the bow. This finally allowed him to reliably William Tell shots and hit the flying targets.

Whether it’s an all-in-one electronic golf club, an explosive baseball bat, or a robotic pool cue, [Shane] is certainly adept at using impressive engineering skills to compensate for his lack of physical skill, or just his willfully closed eyes. Continue reading “Building An Archery Mech Suit To Skip Practice” →

Making A “Unpickable” Lock

November 29, 2020 by Danie Conradie 51 Comments

Every time manufacturers bring a new “unpickable” lock to market, amateur and professional locksmiths descend on the new product to prove them wrong. [Shane] from [Stuff Made Here] decided to try his hand at designing and building an unpickable lock, and found that particular rabbit hole to be a lot deeper than expected. (Video, embedded below.)

Most common pin tumbler locks can be picked thanks to slightly loose fits of the pins and tiny manufacturing defects. By lifting or bumping the pins while putting tension on the cylinder the pins can be made to bind one by one at the shear line. Once all the pins are bound in the correct position, it can be unlocked.

[Shane]’s design aimed to prevent the pins from being set in unlocked position one by one, by locking the all pins in whatever position they are set and preventing further manipulation when the cylinder is turned to test the combination. In theory this should prevent the person doing the picking from knowing if any of the pins were in the correct position, forcing them to take the difficult and time-consuming approach of simply trying different combinations.

[Shane] is no stranger to challenging projects, and this one was no different. Many of the parts had to be remade multiple times, even with his well-equipped home machine shop. The mechanism that holds the pins in the set position when the cylinder is rotated was especially difficult to get working reliably. He explicitly states that this lock is purely an educational exercise, and not commercially viable due to its mechanical complexity and difficult machining.

A local locksmith was unsuccessful in picking the lock with the standard techniques, but the real test is still to come. The name [LockPickingLawyer] has probably already come to mind for many readers. [Shane] has been in contact with him and will send him a lock to test after a few more refinements, and we look forward to seeing the results! Continue reading “Making A “Unpickable” Lock” →

Five-Axis Pumpkin Carving

October 29, 2020 by Danie Conradie 21 Comments

The day of carved pumpkins is near, and instead of doing manually like a mere mortal, [Shane] of [Stuff Made Here] built a five-axis CNC machine to take over carving duties. (Video, embedded below.)

[Shane] initially intended to modify his barber robot, but ended up with a complete redesign, reusing only the electronics and the large ring bearing in the base. The swiveling spindle is a rotating gantry with two sets of aluminum extrusions for vertical and horizontal motion. The gantry isn’t very rigid, but it’s good enough for pumpkin carving. Software is the most challenging part of the endeavor due to the complexity of five-axis motion and mapping 2D images onto a roughly spherical surface. Cartographers have dealt with this for a long time, so [Shane] turned to Mercator projection to solve the problem. We’re also relieved to hear that we aren’t the only ones who sometimes struggle with equation-heavy Wikipedia pages.

Since there are no perfectly spherical pumpkins, [Shane] wrote a script to probe the surface of the pumpkin with a microswitch before cutting, appropriately named “TSA.exe”. The machine is capable of carving both profiles and variable depth lithophanes, mostly of [Shane]’s long-suffering wife. She seriously deserves an award for holding onto her sense of humor.

With projects like explosive baseball bats and CNC basketball hoop, the [Stuff Made Here] YouTube Channel is worth keeping an eye on.

Going For The Home Run Record With Explosive Help

October 27, 2020 by Danie Conradie 6 Comments

The baseball home run distance challenge for crazy engineers is really heating up, with the two main (only?) competitors joining forces. [Shane] of [Stuff Made Here] and [Destin] of [Smarter Every Day] did a deep dive into [Shane]’s latest powder charged baseball bat, designed to hit a ball 600+ feet.

[Shane] built two new versions of his bat this time, using the lessons he learned from his previous V1 and V2 explosive bats. It still uses blank cartridges, but this time the max capacity was increased from three to four cartridges. For V3 a section of the bat was removed, and replaced with a four-bar linkage, which allowed the entire front of the bat to move. The linkage integrated a chamber for four blank cartridges that could be loaded almost like a double barrel shotgun and closed with a satisfying snap. Unfortunately the mass of the moving section was too much for the welds, and the entire front broke off on the first test, so the design was scrapped.

V4 returned to the piston concept of the initial version, except V4 contains two parallel pistons, in a metal bat, with a larger hitting surface. With two cartridges it worked well, but parts started breaking with three and four, and required multiple design updates to fix. [Destin] covered the physics of the project and took some really cool high speed video. He and [Jeremy Fielding] hold the current distance record of 617 ft with their crazy Mad Batter. Unfortunately on [Shane]’s final distance attempt the bat broke again, and the ball was lost in a field with tall grass beyond the 600-foot mark, so they could not confirm if the record was actually broken.

[Destin] and his team still remain the undisputed baseball velocity record holders, with their supersonic baseball canon. It sounds like there might be another collaboration between [Destin] and [Shane] in the future, and we’re definitely looking forward to the results of that crazy venture. Continue reading “Going For The Home Run Record With Explosive Help” →

A Special Baseball Bat With Explosive Hitting Power

August 12, 2020 by Danie Conradie 17 Comments

To make up for some lacking athletic ability, [Shane Wighton] of [Stuff Made Here] created a custom baseball bat with an explosive sweet spot, that almost guarantees a home run. Inside a custom machined bat, he added a piston mechanism, powered by blank cartridges intended for powder actuated nailers, that can hit a ball with impressive force.

Up to three rimfire blank cartridges are placed in the stationary side of the piston mechanism, and are fired by three firing pins on the back of the piston when a ball hits the front of the piston. The expanding gasses then drive the piston out at high velocity, hitting the ball, before it is stopped from flying out completely by a crossbar. The gasses are exhausted through the side of the sleeve, into a “muffler” machined into the front of the bat. The first time [Shane] fired the mechanism with two cartridges, it almost sheared off the stopping bar, and damaged all the other components and blew the bat apart. This led to a complete redesign, including a crossbar with urethane dampers and an aluminum muffler.

The results with the “upgrades” are pretty impressive, and a little scary. Batting distance was around 350 feet with two cartridges, hitting the ball off a tee to avoid putting a pitcher in the firing line. [Shane] did a lab test with three cartridges, which put a hole in the ball and looked like it would break the bat. He expects that three cartridges would allow him to break the home run record, but would require another redesign and will be left for a future video

We admit to being rather envious of [Shane]’s workshop, and the projects that come out of it. We’ve seen him create an all-in-one golf club, a robotic barber, and a robotic basketball hoop, to name a few.

A Robotic Golf Club To (Possibly) Boost Your Game

June 11, 2020 by Danie Conradie 8 Comments

Golf can be incredibly frustrating even for the well practiced player, and probably one of the leading causes for swearing on Saturday mornings. In effort to solve this global problem [Shane Wighton], is creating the ultimate ~~cheat device~~ robotic golf club, that can eliminate all the clubs in one, and adjust for the desired distance mid-swing.

Different golf clubs are mostly defined by their loft angle, or the angle at which the club face is designed to strike the ball in relation to the ground, with the purpose of changing the takeoff angle and therefor the distance traveled. To eliminate the need for different clubs, [Shane] made a head for which the loft angle can be set using a rotary encoder and display on the shaft. However building a tilting a mechanism that can survive the ±4000 lbs of force generated during impact requires some clever engineering. The first iteration was a rather impressive hydraulic design, but it required a large hydraulic power source and the pressure waves generated in the system caused the pistons in the head to blow out every time. The second iteration uses a hobby servo with a combination of machined and SLA printed parts, but in such a way that no force is transmitted to the servo at impact, similar to how a lead screw works. [Shane] actually managed to play a full 18 holes with no problems.

The second feature on the club is to adjust the loft angle mid-swing for the speed of the club to hit the ball a specified distance. A high precision IMU is used to measure the speed and angle of the club. The servo can’t move instantaneously, so it has to predict the impact velocity based on past data. Unfortunately no two swings are ever exactly the same, which introduces some error into the system. Continue reading “A Robotic Golf Club To (Possibly) Boost Your Game” →