Chris the Carpenter's blog

I started welding on the CNC project today. Woo Hoo!

Blog Entries:

Intro: Materials, costs and where I bought stuff

Day one, building Z axis 1.14.12

Oh, we gots so much good stuff...

The Nano Undershield is now available as a combo with a Arduino Nano included, the Medium Tank is out and both the Tiny Tank and Medium Tank come in awesome colors!!

Find all this and more at Rocket Brand Studios

Yup, I'm gunna do it. I am building a CNC.

Oh, where do I start? --Seriously, where do I start?

Well how 'bout that, it sorta works. I don't know if I am going to kit this one or just have fun with it, but either way, here it is.

I still need to finish the lift mechanism for the pen, but other than that, 100% solid. Woo Hoo!

It is ready! It is ready! The Nano UnderShield is ready!

RocketBrandStudios.Com

It seems that God is not without a sense of humor...

So, I had a bit of a run there for a while of producing boards which later became coasters. Bound and determined to not let that happen again, I set out to design my WiiCamera break out boards. I carefully layed out the circuit, breadboarded each and every part, and then designed a neat, simple PCB around the breadboard circuit.

I was filling some gaps of time and once again, started playing with my little drawing bot. A truly sad little bot that has never really found a calling and receives none of my attention. Never the less, I did manage to build a nifty pen-lifter thing and stick a bluetooth module on. As seen in the video, just regular ol' RC control (except via the tilt of the Android phone) with a Sharpie stuck down the middle.

Please don't expect to be impressed.

I just finished and sent off some break out boards to support a wiicamera. These boards use the camera after it has been removed from the wiimote and communicate via i2c NOT the standard bluetooth connection of the wiimote. Included on the board is the necessary reset circuit and 25mhz crystal. There are a total of (4) .9" mounting holes to match 2-56 hardware. 2 of these holes match the hole pattern of the servo horn of the "LMR standard" blue servo. Pull-up resistors are also on board for the i2c lines. The board requires and has a 5-pin header for:

I just got an order of PCB's in and well, I just gotta show them off...

This is a line follow sensor with onboard i/o expander. All 8 sensors can come in (via i2c) in a nice, clean binary byte while still giving you access to each individual sensor if you like. There are 2 mounting positions allowing a forward posistion for curvy line-follow as well as a "closer to the robot" mount for straight-line maze stuff. If nothing else, I am posting to remind folks that boards do not have to be square! Radius your corners, add some details --Don't be afraid of curves, my friends!

Do what I say, not what I do...

I have told a lot of folks that it is very hard/impossible to build an arm using micro servos. As the arm gets longer and the weight of each servo along the arm is added, the base servos can't keep up. Well, I don't believe myself. Now that I have discovered the wonder of Plastruct, and the lightness thereof, I am going to make a stab at this one.

It is official, I have Processing (or at least the code that comes outta the Processing) running on my HTC Evo magic phone.

As always, much love to all who assisted in the nightmare that was the software install.

Woo Hoo!

Just a quick heads-up.

I found quite possibly the most awesome collection of joysticks around. I have yet to get my hands on one, but man --they look good, nice mounting and multi-multi axis. Some of them are X-Y, some are X-Y and button and some are X-Y button AND twist!

Very cool.

They are here at ServoCity.

If you don't think this is wonderful, you should be slapped.

POV via dog.

Sneak Peek --PCB's are on their way...

Just thought I would drop a link...

I finally got around to Instructable'ing my Glen the Stove/ Twitter project. As it is, I needed to do so to enter in the Make it Tweet Contest. I did and I am.

Here is the linky-link.

Holy Geeze,

Did you guys know that there are places to do robot testing on just about every corner? They are all identical (everywhere) and can be counted on for solid, non-changing environments. They go by many names:

Man, I am a sucker for cool little plastic boxes...

So, Nick from Gadget Gangster posted a link to this guy over on facebook...

Right off the bat, I wanted one! Then of course, I had to check out the supply house for the enclosure. That was a bad idea and yes, I am building yet another controller for walter.

We're gettin' somewhere...

This is Walter "docking" or stopping inside of a given area. I should say that in the video, Walter comes up quite short on the target. This is an issue with the beacon, not Walter. Walter judges distance from the beacon by judging the "size" of the beacon within the view of the camera. --As he gets closer, the dot of light gets bigger. When you put nice, fresh batteries in the beacon, it becomes super-duper bright and thus, Walter thinks he is closer than he is. I just need to get around to doing a bit of "regulation" on that beacon...

Enjoy...

I used this trick for spacers as short as 1/8" and it worked fine. You would think that the brass tube would "drill itself" down, make the hole deeper and thus make longer spacers. In actuality, the blade prevents this from happening. The jig could be improved using real wood instead of MDF --a nice maple or ash would be great, but for now, it seems to work fine. The blade used in the video had already made around 40 cuts to the copper tube. --Pretty dull, actually and it still works fine.

It's pretty simple, I have learned 3 things already in building a delta "pick and place" robot arm...

1) There seems to be a lot of math involved in making these guys move properly. I didn't know that going into this project. Hmm..

2) Every joint must deflect quite a bit, both ways, and in BOTH THE X AND Y directions. More than 45 degrees each way seems to be a minimum.

3) What Gareth is to polymorph, I am to brass tubing. Yes, after cutting (24) perfect spacers in a row, I am now the Tubing God. --Modest too!

Yup, Walter needs a little buddy. With a WiiCamera onboard, Walter now has the ability to track and follow IR beacons and thus, could in theory, play follow-the-leader and hide-and-seek. But to play these games, he is going to need someone to play with! I bring you Walter Jr. aka Mini me aka Little Walter aka Little Buddy aka (the most famous "little buddy") Gilligan. The main deal with Gilligan is the fact that he has no budget. None. Nada. No money. He is going to have to be built out of whatever I have on hand.

Well, I got sick of having a lappy as a middle-man between my wiimote and my robot (via bluetooth). I decided to remove the camera itself and go with on-board i2c instead of sending BT data back and forth. Now, I have seen a lot of great "adapters" to go from the fine pitch of the wiicamera pins to "standard" pin spacing, but I need not only to adapt the pins, but also a good way to mount the device to the pan and tilt mechanism I have on Walter. I decided to etch a PCB for the task using, I think, the easiest PCB etching process around. Period.

Performance, Feedback, Revision.

Here is my MP3 playing routine. It shows an int coming in, gettting converted to a string, and then assembled into a longer string which is then sent to the mp3 unit via serial. The only object you should need to make this work is "Numbers" with is sorta "Parallax standard".

Woo Hoo! Navigation, headmoves and audio all about 90% there. There is still a lot of adding-to and cleaning up but it is very nice to be back to a solid base in which to work from. Much more personallity needs to be added, i.e. he should have something to say when getting stuck in a corner etc. The wiimote code I have been working on also needs to be added. The wiimote is being used solely for it's IR camera, using it to find an IR beacon. Basically, the beacon consists of 2 IR leds (constantly on) set 4" apart.

I am learning Visual Basic.

Funny story, Phoenix somehow found a tutorial on youtube for programing a rock/paper/scissors game in VB. He was pretty excited about it, which is funny, Charlie is sorta the geek around here and the game itself really was not that spectactular. At any rate, we ended up downloading the editor and running the program. Went well, actually. I think he might actually get into this stuff.

Just got my boards back today. I did the seeedstudio 2x2 $20 deal and I guess I can't complain. No better or worse than SparkFun's boards, cheaper yes but almost 5 weeks to get them. At any rate, they are here and populated and work great. One of these guys is becoming a dedicated i2c servo-driver slave and another is going to be the new brain in the VEX transmitter. Super Nifty!

I was putting together an order of PCB's to be made when my youngest, CharlieMac, became interested in the lay-out software I was using. I have to admit, it does look very cool when making a board --all those traces and pads, color coded... At any rate, I gave him a shot and he quickly (within 20 min) had figured out how the software worked. Being curious, I drew up a schematic on paper and gave it to him. Pretty simple, just a coin-flip circuit on a 08m. Ten minutes later, he had actually drawn it up... well! He got every connection correct.

When I have mentioned my Glen the Stove project in the past, no less than 4 people told me that they just didn't believe that A) we actually use coal to heat the house or B) that anyone still used coal as a heat source. People do, and a big truck delivers it. Really, I am posting this video here for no other reason than the lift mechanism on the truck is awesome... It not only tilts like a regular dump truck, but it is part scissor-lift as well. They driver said the bed part of the truck was over 60 years old! Too cool.