Category Archives: Robotics

Raspberry Pi Zero Stepper Driver, First of Many Modules

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The Raspberry Pi in general (and the Zero W model in particular) are wonderful pieces of hardware, but they’re not entirely plug-and-play when it comes to embedded applications. The user is on the hook for things like providing a regulated power source, an OS, and being mindful of proper shutdown and ESD precautions. Still, the capabilities make it worth considering and [Alpha le ciel] has a project to make implementation easier with the Raspberry Pi Zero W Stepper Motor Module, which is itself part of a larger project plan to make the Pi Zero W into a robust building block …read more

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Adding Smarts To Dumb Brushed Motors

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A big part of the Hackaday Prize this year is robotics modules, and already we’ve seen a lot of projects adding intelligence to motors. Whether that’s current sensing, RPM feedback, PID control, or adding an encoder, motors are getting smart. Usually, though, we’re talking about fancy brushless motors or steppers. The humble DC brushed motor is again left out in the cold.

This project is aiming to fix that. It’s a smart motor driver for dumb DC brushed motors. You know, the motors you can buy for pennies. The motors that are the cheapest way to add movement to any …read more

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Modular Robotics That Can Make Themselves Into Anything

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The greatest challenge of robotics is autonomy. Usually, this means cars that can drive themselves, a robotic vacuum that won’t drive down the stairs, or a rover on Mars that can drive on Mars. This project is nothing like that. Instead of building a robot with a single shape, this robot is made out of several modules that can self-assemble into different structures. It’s an organized fleet of robots, all helping each other, like an ant colony, or our future as Gray Goo.

If the idea of self-assembling modular robots sounds familiar, you’re right. The Dtto won the Grand Prize …read more

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Friday Hack Chat: Ladyada on Creative and Interactive Robotics

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Somewhere at the intersection of microcontrollers, open source toolchains, the Maker Movement, and the march of technology, there’s a fuzzy concept that can best be described as robotics or physical computing. Instead of a computer in a box or a dumb microcontroller, these projects interact with the outside world. Whether that’s through the Internet, tapping a bunch of sensors, or just waving the arm of a servo around, there’s a need for a platform that actually does all of this stuff. For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking all about creative and interactive robots, and you’re invited. …read more

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Folding Robots With Special Materials

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When it comes to robots, we usually see some aluminum extrusion, laser-cut parts, maybe some 3D printed parts, and possibly a few Erector sets confabulated into a robot arm. This entry for the Hackaday Prize is anything but. It’s a robot chassis, a 3D printer, and the structural frame for any sort of moving project that’s made out of a special composite material.

[Marc]’s project for the Hackaday Prize is all about articulated mechanisms. Instead of the usual structural components, he’s using Hylite, a special material that’s basically a polypropylene core clad in a sheet of aluminum on both sides. …read more

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Servo Becomes Mini Linear Actuator

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RC servos are a common component in many robotics projects, but [Giovanni Leal] needed linear motion instead of the rotary actuation that servos normally offer. The 3D Printed Mini Linear Actuator was developed as a way to turn a mini servo into a linear actuator, giving it more power in the process.

A servo uses a potentiometer attached to the output shaft in order to sense position, and the internal electronics take care of driving the motor to move the shaft to the desired angle. [Giovanni] took apart an economical mini servo and after replacing the motor with a 100:1 …read more

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Modular Robotics Made Easier With ROS

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A robot is made up of many hardware components each of which requires its own software. Even a small robot arm with a handful of servo motors uses a servo motor library.

Add that arm to a wheeled vehicle and you have more motors. Then attach some ultrasonic sensors for collision avoidance or a camera for vision. By that point, you’ve probably split the software into multiple processes: one for the arm, another for the mobility, one for vision, and one to act as the brains interfacing somehow with all the rest. The vision may be doing object recognition, something …read more

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Luke Kingma & Lou Patrick-Mackay’s, ‘Self-Driving Crowd Sourced Tech Support’

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via Luke Kingma & Lou Patrick-Mackay at Futurism Cartoons
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Gentle Electric Eel

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It’s no shock that electric eels get a bad wrap for being scary creatures. They are slithery fleshy water snakes who can call down lightning. Biologists and engineers at the University of California had something else in mind when they designed their electric eel. Instead of hunting fish, this one swims harmlessly alongside them.

Traditional remotely operated vehicles have relied on hard shells and spinning propellers. To marine life, this is noisy and unnatural. A silent swimmer doesn’t raise any eyebrows, not that fish have eyebrows. The most innovative feature is the artificial muscles, and although the details are scarce, …read more

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Modular Robotics: When You Want More Robots in Your Robot

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While robots have been making our lives easier and our assembly lines more efficient for over half a century now, we haven’t quite cracked a Jetsons-like general purpose robot yet. Sure, Boston Dynamics and MIT have some humanoid robots that are fun to kick and knock over, but they’re far from building a world-ending Terminator automaton.

But not every robot needs to be human-shaped in order to be general purpose. Some of the more interesting designs being researched are modular robots. It’s an approach to robotics which uses smaller units that can combine into assemblies that accomplish a given task. …read more

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