There’s a long standing tradition of rustic sign and furniture making in the Adirondacks. I grew up here and saw many examples of this in my youth. There’s an intersection near my old house called Crystal Dale Corners and when I was here in 1998 I was very moved by the beauty of this area in a way that I hadn’t been as a boy, and so I decided to make a sign to mark this location.
This short video shot on location tells the tale…
Keep on hackin!
The iRobot Roomba is a great robotic device for hardware hackers and robot builders.
They can be found on Ebay for as little as $20 with and without batteries. The battery pack seems to be the main reason they get sold because most users just don’t want to bother replacing the battery, which costs about $45 on Ebay. Other items that cause problems are dirty wheel sensors, a siezed cleaning brush motor and an occasional broken drive belt. Most of these problems aren’t a concern to hardware hackers.
The The Roomba contains a variety of sensors, motors and raw hardware that can be disassembled and used to build other roving robot devices. I’ve used parts from Roomba in several hacks and I’d say that my favorite part are the motors. They have a belt driven planetary gear reduction transmission that provides very high torque and they can be driven directly from the H-bridge that is already on the Roomba main board. Each assembly has a wheel sensor but it tends to drift in it’s accuracy due to the belt drive slipping slightly.
Follow along with the video now and learn how to do a tear down on a Roomba vacuum robot. This video will guide you through all the steps to disassemble the Roombe for repairs or to simply salvage parts. There’s a few blooper moments at the beginning of this one that I left in for laughs! Enjoy!
Keep on hackin!
They can speak to each other! Well, random phrases anyway but it’s interesting to see what pops up next as they babble to each other. This is part four of this project, which will remain ongoing and revisited from time to time. In fact, I’d like to develop these further with sensors and action based on sensor input. I might end up with these at Bay Area Maker Faire in 2013.
This module is a lot of fun to mess with and I ended up learning a little more about programming in C which always great. I would say spend the $60 and add some speech to just about anything electronic!
This video pretty much explains everything you need to know to get an Emic 2 up and running with an Arduino. The schematic is posted below and the code can be found here.
Til next time…
keep on hackin!
It’s finally published! Make Magazine Vol.31 has my Automatic Ball Launcher on the cover and a full build article inside!
I wrote the article around the first of the year and after much editing and emailing we put together an awesome how-to with great pictures, diagrams and detailed instructions. The people at Make did a great job creating the illustrations and building a cover version and a standard version of the “Fetch-O-Matic” for the article. Big thanks to Make for the opportunity to share this project!
I designed this ball launcher with three things in mind. Mechanical simplicity, ease of operation and ease of acquiring parts. You can readily get all the parts needed to build this ball launcher from online sources and your local hardware store. It has minimal wiring and requires a medium skill level in carpentry, wiring and machine work. Most people that make and fix things in their garage or workshop should have most of the tools on hand to build it. The whole thing is self resetting and mechanically simple with only three moving parts. It operates on a cordless drill battery, a windshield wiper motor (worm gear reduction/high torque), some wire, and a micro switch.
You can download the PDF build templates and schematic here.
For the whole build article you can buy Vol. 31 of Makezine, or subscribe to the digital version after the jump.
Now enjoy the video and when it’s done go build a ball launcher! Hack it up! Modify it, have fun with it, pass it on!
Thanks for watching and…
Keep on hackin!
Dino
It can talk! After a long session at the workbench this past Sunday, I managed to build the mechanism and the circuit to make my robot box talk with Emic 2 supplying the speech! I used a random function in the Arduino code to get Emic 2 to speak random phrases. I’m still working on better code so I’ll wait until the final installment to post it here.
The sound to voltage circuit was explained last week and this week it all got mounted on a perfboard along side an LM386 amplifier circuit.
The motor with the bent wire worked perfectly to open the mouth, and gravity closes it when the voltage is no longer present.
I drew up a new schematic too…
Next week there will be two robots having a “random” conversation with each other. That should be fun! Enjoy the video and until then…
…keep on hackin!
