Tag Archives: robot

Introducing New Arduino Column on Make

via Arduino Blog

Make the future with Arduino

As Ken Denmead, MAKE Editorial Director, announced some hours ago we are also thrilled for the monthly column Massimo’s is going to write for MAKE blog. We’ve been brainstorming on the title and the final choice is “MAKE the Future with Arduino” :

Massimo will share his unique perspective on the Arduino platform, including insight on the development of the boards, new products, and exciting projects for Arduino fans to share and adapt. Indeed, today’s first column is a preview of an exciting new Arduino product that will be unveiled to the world at Maker Faire Bay Area this week—the Arduino Robot.

 

Enjoy the article  and stay tuned for more news!

 

 

Live motion tracking

via Raspberry Pi

It is a bank holiday, and we are all quite…cheerful, post company barbecue, so I will keep this brief. Here’s a motion tracking demo from Erik Haberup. He says:

In case the Raspberry Pi team would like another example of the versatility of their product.

This is my capstone project for the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (Computer Electronics Engineering) which uses a Raspberry Pi to wirelessly transmit live motion tracking data from a set of 13 inertial measurement units.

I’ll ask Erik for some more information, but in the meantime, I thought you might like to enjoy this *outstanding* video.

Equipping teens with hands-on approach to robots

via Arduino Blog

frank magazu

 

Hello, I am Frank Magazu. I am 16 years old and go to school in Pasco, Florida. I make robots with the Arduino and got interviewed by my school district. Here is a video of me. Thanks for helping me become proficient at robotics as well as electronics and programing in general.

Thank you Frank! You made our day with your email. Keep up with the great work you and your professor are doing to inspire more people in getting involved in diy robots.

 

Bleuette, the hexapod robot

via Arduino Blog

bleuette hexapod robot

Bleuette project is hexapod robot equipped with 6 legs that can be operated without any external guidance.

The french project is fully open hardware (made entirely with  an Ultimaker 3D printer) / opensource and operates on a Arduino Leonardo board with a custom shield developed for it and available on Hugo’s website, the author of the project. It is used mostly to control the 12 servos (+ 2 optional) for the legs, measure voltage and current.

Take a look at the robot’s first steps!

 

Hugo is also thinking about future developments for Bleuette, like equipping it with a Bluetooth connection, a magnetic sensor to keep an edge when walking and finally a mobile turret with an ultrasonic sensor to detect obstacles in front of it.

Interested in the code? you can find it on Github:

The State of Free Hardware for Robotics

SERB Robot, CC photo by flickr user oomlout

FreeIO.org is currently running a poll to determine what sort of free hardware project the community would most like to see developed. At present the poll is leaning heavily towards robots. So I thought it would be worthwhile to do a quick survey of existing free/open hardware robot projects to see what there is to work with and improve on. There are a lot of FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software) robotics projects out there too but this article will focus on hardware projects that are under free hardware licenses. See the FreeIO.org “about page” to learn more about the concepts of free / open hardware.

I’ve attempted to list the projects roughly in chronological order by the project’s creation date. To qualify for this list, a project needs several attributes: 1) it must be a complete mobile robot, not just part of a robot such as a manipulator arm 2) the hardware design documents (e.g. CAD files, schematics, etc) must be available under a free license (i.e. a license that protects the user’s basic freedoms – licenses with commercial-use restrictions are NOT free/open licenses, 3) at least one working robot must have been developed and demonstrated. Projects that are in the planning stages didn’t make the list as we’d like to see well-proven designs that have been well-tested in the real world.

Read on for the full list of free/open hardware robot designs!

Continue reading →

Bilingual R2D2

via Raspberry Pi

Sadly, I don’t have any more information on this project besides what you can see in the video. Which is a grave shame, ‘cos it’s brilliant. Greensheller, who is somewhere in China, has made his girlfriend an interactive, multilingual, face-recognising R2D2 for her birthday, using a Pi and some other off-the-shelf electronics. I am in no small way VERY JEALOUS.

If anybody reading can find out more about this project, please let us know; we’re all ears!

 

Phoebe is hinting that she wants some LEDs

via Raspberry Pi

Meltwater, who you may know from our forums or from the MagPi, where he’s a regular contributor, has been introducing Phoebe, who celebrates her sixth birthday in February, to electronics engineering. He says:

I’ve been working on producing a RGB LED module to use with the Raspberry Pi, since the bright colours and being able to control something so instant is ideal for playing with. I’m using GPIO, LEDs and Scratch being on the to do list (motors to follow).

 

Anyway, I was writing some notes out for it and Phoebe wanted to help, so she copied the entire page, asking about what each part was (this is before I’ve even shown her the LEDs switched on).  She also drew me a diagram of the circuit they did the other week at school, a “battery”, “tough long wires” and “light bulb” (I think I might have to offer an afternoon there at some point, but is only 1st year).

 

Meltwater attached some photos to the email, and I thought they deserved sharing. Our suspicion is that Phoebe really, really wants some LEDs, and this is a subtle way of getting the message across.

Meltwater’s original notebook scribblings (click to embiggen)…

…and Phoebe’s remarkably faithful copy. A father/daughter trip to the electronics shop for LEDs is coming up this week. Phoebe has said she wants pink ones. (Click to enlarge)

Careers day at Phoebe’s school is going to be a hoot.

I will leave you with Phoebe’s robot; she’s been doing some paper prototyping with Dad. What have you been doing with your kids over the holiday? Mail me if you’ve got something you’d like to share; we love looking at your kids’ projects!

Phoebe’s robot. She says that next she wants to go to the metal shop (B&Q) for parts.

 

XBee-controlled 4WD wireless robot

via Arduino Blog

In his blog, Michael describes a nice 4WD robot he realized by means of an arduino-compatible board, a motor shield and a couple of XBee radios, which have been used to implement a simple and effective remote control.

Actually, the remote is made up of a standard breadboard equipped with a joystick, a couple of buttons (that can turn the robot in a Kitt-like vehicle!) and the XBee radio. One interesting feature of this project is that the remote controller is fairly simple and has been designed to work with just the XBee radio board, instead of requiring an additional MCU.

More details can be found here.

[Via: Project Lab - Nootropic design]

Drawing Arm with Arduino

via Arduino Blog


Can you imagine to build a robotic arm that can draw? Actually [acorv] realized a good prototype.

I wanted to build a drawing arm that could write. My first version wasn’t good enough, so I built this one. I used timing belts and pulleys to improve the resolution. Stepper motors are driven by a Motor Shield on top of an Arduino UNO. On the tip, a servo motor allows the pen to go up and down. For input, I used a touch pad.

A more detailed description can be found on the [website].

arduino-line-follower-organ

via Arduino Blog

Invention of a new Open Source mechanical musical instrument

Following the « DYI » trend, here comes a musical automaton created by [EricDuino]. This Arduino based autonomous robot is named « Line Follower Organ », « Orgue Suiveur de Ligne » in its maiden language.

What’s new with this instrument is that it moves along its partition in order to play it.

It’s still at a very early stage and it cannot play a full symphony or house music yet. Hopefully the Open Source community will soon make it play Electro Hop.

 

Weird Eye Robot with the Arduino Starter Kit

via Arduino Blog

[Robotgrrl] made a nice project with the Arduino Starter Kit: The Eye Robot.

It reacts differently when you ‘pet’ it and ‘poke’ it. Beware when it ruffles its brow! It enjoys singing short jingles. Rumour has it that the light up googely eye can peer into your soul.

source [Robotgrrl]