Makelangelo is a wall hanging, mural drawing machine. There is a motor on the top left and top right of the wall, and belts hang down from there to the pen. Tension caused by gravity keeps the belt on the pulley.
To draw on the entire wall you need a belt long enough for the pen to reach the bottom corners, going diagonally across the drawing area. That means if the pen were to be in the middle and drop all the way to the bottom it would hit the floor.
Problem
When the machine tries to find home by touching limit switches, the pen holder hits the floor as described. Gravity stops, tension is lost, and the machine becomes confused.
Solution
This 3D printed tensioner fits a roller skate bearing (8x22x7) and holds the bearing against the belt, gently pinching it against the pulley. This prevents skipping and allows large machines to find home.
This has an added bonus of letting the machine accelerate faster without skipping.
Print two (one for each bearing) and then fit them onto the two corners and enjoy!
The 2019 Vancouver Maker fair was a hit, and so was the Sixi Robot! We spent the day interviewing attendees about what they would do with a robot arm, and we’ll use that feedback to make use-case videos.
Our booth was planned well in advance and we even brought a carpet to stand on.
Everything technical was very smooth. The robot shipped in perfect working order and didn’t misbehave the entire day. I had a couple of software glitches, which were quickly solved by restarting the app. The venue was set up such that we had to flip our booth design and reprogram the robot for the new position. Who could have foreseen that one, right?
Jin and Dan
The venue didn’t give us any chairs for the day, but we were having too much fun to sit down.
Here’s what it looked like from the camera’s point of view. Sometimes you can see the selfie in the mirror in the selfie in the mirror in the selfie in the mirror and then it’s too small to tell what’s going on.
We felt really inspired by all the great people who came out to share and enjoy. Definitely something we’d consider doing again. Go check out your local maker fair!
Our goal is to automatically transfer motions created using traditional animation software to robotic characters while avoiding such artifacts. To this end, we develop an optimization-based, dynamics-aware motion retargeting system that adjusts an input motion such that visually salient low-frequency, large amplitude vibrations are suppressed.
Read the original disney research paper at https://la.disneyresearch.com/publication/publication-process-vibration-minimizing-motion-retargeting-for-robotic-characters/.
Hey, gang! Happy International Women’s day. On my birthday women celebrate around the world. That never gets old. Something something my ego.
Jin is down with seasonal allergies/mild death and we don’t have our amazing interns any more, so this week has been a little rough.
New! ELEC-0134 Sir Ramps-a-lot Dark Knight
We use the sir-ramps-a-lot board so that our Mega/RAMPs combo can easily control external drivers. Some of the drivers we purchased decided to be contentious and are designed with all their signals reversed, so we needed a sir-ramps-a-lot that was ALSO reversed. Anyways, here it is!
The inverse and forward kinematics are both working great, which means you can move it either way and switch between the two as you see fit. Making the IK and FK code work took me three whole days of agony, so there’s not much progress in other areas this week.
Sixi Robot Rendering
This is pretty close to our vision for the robot. We’ve had it assembled and we’ve even got it moving, but I’m not ready to show it to the world just yet. It’s coming together! I would love to show you some action shots we’ve taken… but these PR things have to be handled just right, you know what I mean? Patience is a virtue.
Next
Now the challenge is to program waypoints and paths (all the beziers!) to build higher-level applications for the arm. Meanwhile Jin is stress testing the cycloid gearboxes and coming up with new ways to make them even better-er.
Cool! So subscribe to this blog or our Youtube channel OR our Instagram for all the latest and I will see you next time!
