Collaborate Disseminate
To keep track of a location in a two-dimensional space, two measurements are needed. Most of the time, we would naturally think to do this by the Cartesian method, measuring …read more Continue reading Pen Plotter Uses Polar Coordinates
Laboratory automation equipment is expensive stuff, to such a degree that small labs are often priced out of the market. That’s a shame, because there are a lot of tedious …read more Continue reading 3D Printer Repurposed for Light-Duty Lab Automation Tasks
Join us on Wednesday, June 9 at noon Pacific for the LED Matrix Hack Chat with Garrett Mace! It’s pretty amazing how quickly light-emitting diodes went from physics lab curiosity …read more Continue reading LED Matrix Hack Chat
We all know that version one of a project is usually a stinker, at least in retrospect. Sure, it gets the basic idea into concrete form, but all it really does is set the stage for a version two. That’s better, but still not quite there. Version three is where …read more
Continue reading Third Time’s a Charm for This Basketball-Catching Robot
It’s a great time to be a hobbyist. No matter how you feel about the Arduino/Raspberry Pi effect, the influx of general enthusiasm and demand it has created translates to better availability of components, a broader community, and loads of freely available knowledge. When people have access to knowledge and ideas, great things can happen. Tools that were once restricted to industrial use become open source, and the price of entry-level versions goes into a nosedive.
As we’ve seen over the last several years, the price of cheap 3D printers keeps falling while the bar of quality keeps rising. It’s …read more
Cartesian 3D printers were the original. Then delta printers came along, and they were pretty cool too. Now, you can add tripteron printers to the mix. The tripteron is an odd mix of cartesian and delta. The system was invented at the robotics laboratory at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada. The team who created it say that it is “isotropic and fully decoupled, i.e. each of the actuators is controlling one Cartesian degree of freedom, independently from the others.” This means that driving the bot will be almost as simple as driving a standard X/Y/Z Cartesian printer. The corollary to …read more
Cartesian 3D printers were the original. Then delta printers came along, and they were pretty cool too. Now, you can add tripteron printers to the mix. The tripteron is an odd mix of cartesian and delta. The system was invented at the robotics laboratory at Université Laval in Quebec, Canada. The team who created it say that it is “isotropic and fully decoupled, i.e. each of the actuators is controlling one Cartesian degree of freedom, independently from the others.” This means that driving the bot will be almost as simple as driving a standard X/Y/Z Cartesian printer. The corollary to …read more
