Collaborate Disseminate
Reaction wheels are useful things, typically used by satellites to keep themselves oriented the right way up in space. Turning the reaction wheel creates an equal and opposite torque in …read more Continue reading Building Reaction Wheels With Python and LEGO
If you march sufficiently deep into the wilderness of control theory, you’ll no doubt encounter the inverted pendulum problem. These balancing acts have emerged with a number of variants over …read more Continue reading Ball Balancing Wheel Puts a Spin on Inverted Pendulums
It seems as though we still can’t hit the ceiling on better control schemes for 3D Printers. Input Shaping is the latest technique to land on our radar, a form of resonance compensation that all but eliminates the ghosting (aka: vertical ringing) artifacts we see on the walls of printed …read more
Continue reading Control Theory Spellcasting Banishes the 3D Printing Ghosts
When we first saw [Barqunics’] design for a self-stabilizing spoon for people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, we wondered how well something like that could work. But take a look at the video below and you’ll see this does a fine job of responding to the user’s hand movements and keeping …read more
Continue reading Parkinson’s Spoon uses Control Theory for Good
One of the problems about learning too much control system theory is that you start to realize almost everything is some sort of control system. That’s the case with [Fernando Zigunov]. After observing a Rayleigh-Plateau instability in his kitchen sink, he decided to build a little display piece that shows …read more
Continue reading Piddler Illustrates Aliasing and the z-Transform
If we are hiring someone such as a carpenter or an auto mechanic, we always look for two things: what kind of tools they have and what they do when things go wrong. For many types of embedded systems, one important tool that serious developers use is the Kalman filter. …read more