Humanoid robot will eventually take over the world

March 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Over the last two years, [Mark] at the Harford (and Baltimore) Hackerspace has been building 401k, a humanoid robot that will soon be able to walk on two legs, detect objects, and fight along with its comrades in the robot insurrection that leads to the extinction of man.

To get an idea of how complicated a humanoid robot is, realize the Honda ASIMO has been an ongoing project for over a decade now and can be easily defeated by stairs. [Mark] doesn’t have the benefit of millions of dollars in funding or dozens of lab assistants – in one video, [Mark] shows us the foot pads made out of [George Foreman] grill lids and hip joints made out of DVD players. Even though he’s using “unconventional” parts, 401k still has a very advanced pair of legs that model their human analog very well.

Even though it’s still a work in progress, there’s an incredible amount of work and expertise that is going into this build. [Mark] is wants to take 401k to this year’s RoboGames next month. We hope he gets his build walking in time, even for a few baby steps.

You can check out more of the 401k build vlog on [Mark]’s YouTube channel.

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Motor controller also does nyan cat

March 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As a freshman at UC Berkeley, [Keegan] has been helping out with his school’s Pioneers in Engineering program that gives high school students some hands on experience with engineering principles, usually by building robots. This year, [Keegan]’s project is a motor controller that just so happens to play the nyan cat song over the motor PWM output.

The motor controller is meant to replace the Pololu simple motor controller the PiE team is currently using. Onboard is an H-bridge chip and an ATmega328 that takes commands from an I2C bus. The ‘328 is loaded up with the Arduino bootloader making the firmware very accessible – a good thing for the high school students that will be building and programming these robots.

[Keegan] put up the Eagle files for the board up on the PiE Wiki. For now, just enjoy the dulcet tones of the pop tart cat theme song after the break.

[Read more…]

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StorageBot finds all your components, makes your storage drawers feel inadequate

March 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Your experience with making things, building projects, and hacking hardware is directly proportional to the amount of components you have on hand; as our experience grows, so do our space and storage requirements, it seems. [Danh Trinh] must have decades of experience, because his StorageBot robotic parts drawer is as awesomely absurd as it is clever and useful.

At first glance, StorageBot just looks like a bunch of small parts drawers mounted to the wall with LED strips along the top and side. The magic happens when [Danh] walks up to the wall-mounted laptop and commands StorageBot to find a component with his voice. A video is worth a thousand words, so you might as well head to the video for the best description available

To get the StorageBot to listen to his voice, [Danh] downloaded Microsoft’s speech recognition SDK and built a VB app to turn his voice into a location of what drawer contains the part he requested. Once StorageBot finds the row and column of the requested part, a pair of stepper motors behind the wall of parts drawers swing into action. Soon enough, the drawer containing the requested part pops out, and [Danh] can go about his business building more awesome stuff.

Because a few paragraphs can’t convey exactly how cool [Danh]’s StorageBot is, take a look at the videos after the break.

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Gamelatron, a fully robotic indonesian Gamelan orchestra.

March 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Last summer we got to have a little chat with [Aaron Taylor] about his automated Gamelan orchestra, Gamelatron. The robotic orchestra features a large collection of Indonesian gongs,  metallophones, xylophones and cymbals actuated using simple pull solenoids attached to mallets.  Gamelatron’s custom controller activates the various 24V solenoids using MIDI,  the whole thing is essentially a gigantic MIDI instrument that can be played by whatever sequencing device you so please.

[Aaron] has a variety of ways to pump MIDI into the controller including the “Padma Bhuwana”, a wooden box with 16 arcade buttons wired to an Arduino. The Arduino can either activate sequences on a computer running Ableton live or the MIDI sequence can be pumped directly out of the Arduino for a computer free interactive installation. [Aaron] also plugs his Akai MPD32 to the computer for live shows or he can just let the laptop do all the work for non-interactive installations.

The really interesting thing about having 170 or so simply actuated instruments is the ability to spread them out and fill every facet of a space. A great example of this was the Temple of Transition at Burning man 2011 where the gongs and what not else would span multiple floors. Here is a recent Wired magazine video published where [Aaron] gives a quick overview of the setup, or if you are too impatient for the ads check out a few videos of Gamelatron in at burning man and PEX summer festival after the jump. We also included [Aaron]’s kickstarter video which has a few more details on the setup (as well as irrelevant stuff about the kickstarter project that has since expired). With all the crazy midi instrument hacks we get around here it is not stretch of the imagination to see this has lots of interactive potential.

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Robotic doodle clock

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

This clock has a robotic twist to it. It will show you the time by drawing it in dry-erase marker. There’s a bit of play in the arm joints and some loose motor precision which results in a wavy font that prompted [Ekaggrat] to name his project the Doodle Clock.

The shape and building material used here really make the timepiece look great. We think if the arm holding the acrylic writing surface had been at right angles this would not look nearly as pleasing. The video after the break shows the bot in action, at first flexing its wrist to switch back and forth between marker and eraser. From there it starts to draw the time, tracing the segments of each digit multiple times to achieve a readable number. The entire thing is driven by an Arduino compatible board mounted on the base of the clock.

This reminds us of that felt-tipped Turing Machine. A variation on that would also make a really nice clock display.

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A Mannequin Head + Arduino + Webcam = Lots of Creepy Fun!

March 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

styrofoam head robot

This mannequin head was purchased years ago on sale for less than $3. As with many things one sees while shopping, it didn’t have a purpose at the time, but seemed like it would be useful later. Add in an Arduino, some servos, and electronics parts that were acquire in a similar manner, and you have all the ingredients needed for a cool hack.

The build is well documented in the video after the break, and we especially like at 2:24 when who we suppose is the mom says “Look at this mess!” Apparently the next iteration will be a robot to clean everything up!

This iteration is quite impressive though, as it uses a webcam to track objects using a servomotor and lists the code used. For a view of it tracking stuff along with a view of the PC, fast forward to around 8:45. In addition to tracking the parts using the servo, the non-webcam eye changes color from green to yellow depending on if it’s tracking or not. It also featured a blinking necklace, which is also a plus in our eyes.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TithLO3KzzU&w=470&h=315]

For more random head-like creepiness, be sure to check out [Boxie the Creepster]!

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