Micro Arduino bot skitters its way into our hearts.

April 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s a quick and easy little robot with a not-so-pint-sized brain. [Dikos] over at grobot, slapped together some gutted micro servos, an Arduino pro mini, H bridge chip, and a solar key-chain charger  to make this little three wheeled cutie. The robot boasts some very simple object avoidance thanks to the Sharp GP2Y0A21YK analog IR distance sensor, and that’s about it. This leaves tons of Arduino Pro left for a whole slew of sensors and robot stuff. We can’t spot it but somewhere under the pro mini is the solar key-chain’s 3.7V Lipo battery. The PCB for the emergency charger also makes a convenient little back panel housing a few LEDs, charging electronics, and a handy spot to hang a bead roller.

The micro bot has a pretty mean starboard list due to the lack of wheel position feedback, after all the micro servos were gutted to just function as simple gear boxes. We might have kept the servo mostly untouched, ditched the H bridge and performed a continuous rotation mod. We even have a guide for it! This is a really cool little bot though, and not terribly expensive if you need a little maze roller… or if you have a ton of money and like swarms of things.

Check out a (silent) video of the robot after the jump, the bot doesn’t hit the table until 1:16.

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Climbing the mountain of quadcopter design

April 24, 2012 By Leave a Comment

What a sweet thing it is to see the first outdoor flight of a quadcopter. [Botched] has done a wonderful job of documenting the entire build process. Take a look at all that he has done, then jump after the break to see the extremely stable test flight footage.

Earlier iterations used feedback electronics that he designed, etched, and soldered himself. We think they looked pretty good, but he was not happy with the performance. He spent a bunch of time redesigning the IMU board, but after he printed out the PCB artwork he decided his soldering was not up to the QFN challenge and he went with a pre-assembled breakout board.

His post about PID tuning is quite interesting. He removed two of the motors and mounted those opposite ends of the chassis to a hinged stand. This let him tweak the feedback loop until the two remaining propellers were able to maintain balance even when he nudged the unit.

His test flight footage is accompanied by an on-board camera shot. He simply taped a smart phone to the battery and let it roll. Make sure you turn off your speakers before watching this one or the motor noise will let the boss know you’re reading Hackaday again instead of working.

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Cardboard hexapod gets around with three motors

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Here’s a lesson in doing a lot with very little. [Oldrobot] built this hexapod using cardboard for most of the pieces. He still had the box from his vacuum clear and it just happened to have a large black area the makes the top of the beetle look like it’s been painted.

The control board is from an old radio controlled airplane. Since RC airplanes used servos for flight control, it was a snap to hook up the three that make the bug go. One controls the set of middle legs which lift the body and change which of the propulsion legs are in contact with the ground. The other two servers move pairs of the front or back legs. It uses the same concept as this other RC controller hexapod, but much less time went into crafting the chassis and legs.

As you can see in the video after the break, the control scheme isn’t the most intuitive. But once you get a hang of which stick orientation affects each leg movement the bot ends up having fairly precise steering.

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Tank Wars: a video game controlling a physical bot

April 23, 2012 By Leave a Comment

[Joe] sent us an email to show off his latest build. Tank Wars is the beginning of a video game/robot hybrid. You control the tank via an iPad, telling it where to go and how to fire. You have real life targets, in this case another robot. When you hit your target, the interface is updated with game stats.  Currently, this is only a step past being a wifi controlled robot. [Joe] is working on making the game part of it a little more interactive.

The tank and the target are both run by Arduinos with RN-XV WiFly modules.  The tank has obstacle avoidance both forward and backward, which, from the video,  seems like it might make navigating a bit challenging at times. The iPad interface is just a web page, so it could really be used on any device. This is pretty cool, we can’t wait to see how he proceeds from here.

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Sassy disco bots of the 80s

April 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Surely, this is a glimpse into the future. No? Ok, its a glimpse into 1983. A small chinese fast-food restaurant in California put two 4.5 foot tall, 180 pound robots to work delivering food. Tanbo R-1 and Tanbo R-2 were their names and delivering food was their game. At least, when there wasn’t radio interference or their batteries were running low.  They were built to deliver food to the tables and be polite to the customers. They also had some interesting quirky behavior, like responding “that’s not my problem” and dancing off to some disco music if they didn’t understand you.  Do yourself a favor and go read some of the stories. We wish we could have seen them in action, they sound fantastically absurd.

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Lego Mindstorms used to automate tedious laboratory tasks

April 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

lego-bone-machines

Modern society owes so much to medical research, though what happens behind the scenes in a laboratory is usually far less than glamorous. A group of scientists at the University of Cambridge are working to develop synthetic bone tissue, but the process to create the samples used in the study is incredibly tedious.

To make the bones, a substructure must be dipped in a mixture of calcium and protein, rinsed, then dipped in a mixture of phosphate and protein…hundreds and hundreds of times. Equipment that can automate the process is available but very cost prohibitive, so the scientists did what they do best and built a set of robots to do the work for them.

Their new bone manufacturing setup was constructed using Lego Mindstorm kits, which were a perfect solution to their problem in several ways. The kits are relatively cheap, easy to construct, easy to program, and able to perform the same function precisely for days on end.

Now instead of burning time manually creating synthetic bone samples, the group can focus on the more important facets of their research.

Continue reading to see a video presented at the 2012 Google Science Fair, showing how everything came together for the crew at Cambridge.

[via Make]

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