Vacuum Former Finished

I've been working on building a vacuum former, on and off, since about November. Prior to today, it was still just a pile of parts -- it's now operational.

The former is build out of Home Depot aluminum, a cookie sheet with holes drilled in it, a portable grill/crockpot thingy, and massive shop vac.

It's pretty much a monstrosity. I tried to keep it small, by reducing the height of the lower box, but then ended up finding out I didn't have enough space to get the vacuum tube to turn... I then found these great adjustable legs, from a commercial range, they brought up the height a bunch, and made it easy to plug the tube in. They also add a bunch of weight to the bottom, making it quite a bit more stable.

Unfortunately, you'll have to wait a bit longer to see some of the results, as I didn't get around to snapping shots of Nelson's face plate.

-Fergs

SMALdog gets a new (printed!) head!

I've been slowly getting the Makerbot tuned in, moving to using an SD card made a huge improvement in build quality, and I'm finally comfortable enough with the bot to walk away for a while. So, today I finally printed SMALdog's new head, the largest item I've printed to date, and my first >1h print.

The first one looked great, but about half way through, the pile of ABS got all coiled up, I walked back in to find that the print head and Z-carriage were pulled to the top of the bot, and the ABS was hanging off the side. De-tangle, reset, chop off about 10-20ft of ABS, and tried again. This print took 1h38m.

I then cleaned it up, attached the dual IR sensors, and the AX-12 servo. The 5/8" hole for the sonar sensor needed quite a bit of cleanup, but everything else was nearly perfect. I've now got all the sensors except the IR photodiode mounted, and the head is on SMALdog.

Now, I've got about 4 wks before the fire fighting competition. Hopefully that is enough time to tune his walking gait, load the map following code in, and get everything else working....

-Fergs

What's New in the Lab

It's been a busy month, and the lack of updates here is a testament to that. Over the past month, Vanadium has released two new products, and has another on the way. The MINI RoboController has been on shelves for a few weeks at Trossen, and the ArbotiX Commander should be in stock later this week.

We also purchased a MakerBot, which is now up and running. This little guy will be producing robot parts soon, as I have a number of projects on the backlog that I want to get going.

As for that product on the way: how about controlling some RX-64 servos with your ArbotiX? You'll be able to do just that with our new RX-Bridge, a little add-on board for the ArbotiX that converts it from an AX-12 controller, to an RX-series controller (and EX-106's too).

Lastly, we've been hard at working testing, and the V1.1 release of PyPose/NUKE is just around the corner. Should be out very shortly, with a number of improvements and bug-fixes. Unfortunately, mammal-style IK will be held over until v1.2.

-Fergs

New Products Coming

There are a few products we've been alluding to over the past few months, and they are about to be released.

The first is the MINI robocontroller. It's a smaller version of the ArbotiX based on the ATmega168 -- so it's completely Arduino compatible. Just like the ArbotiX it has a dual motor driver, XBEE socket, low dropout regulator, and 3-pin headers for I/O. The MINI also a block of 4 I/O ports that can be easily configured to control servos. The only thing it's missing from it's big brother is that it can't control AX-12s, and it has fewer I/O. This is the perfect board for your first rover! The MINI has had serious testing, an earlier revision was used as the scoring transponder for Mech Warfare 2009, and the new MINI's will be the scoring transponder for MW2010 and beyond. The MINI is also been the board used in my Introduction to Embedded Computing and Robotics workshop. MINIs will retail for $60, and should be available from Trossen Robotics later this week.

A completely different product is the ArbotiX Commander -- it's an Arduino+XBEE based handheld wireless controller. If you've been using NUKE, you've probably heard of our Commander library and protocol. Being open source, you can hack the Commander to do whatever -- there's a row of female headers along the side of the chip, and a whole slew of extra prototyping area at the top edge. It'll be a bit pricey compared to off-the-shelf controllers like the PS2, but I think the open-source and integrated XBEE make this the perfect controller for advanced roboticists. The Commander will be available later this month!

-Fergs

Get Your IK On

The Nearly Universal Kinematics Engine (NUKE) is finally out in a first beta. Right now our templates only support 3DOF Lizard-legged 4 and 6 leg robots, however 3DOF Mammal-style leg support isn't far off, and low DOF Biped support is in the works. This is the same system that powered Issy, Roz, and Jeff to take the top 3 spots at CNRG's Walker Challenge. It takes about 20-30 minutes to setup your bot once you get the hang of what's going on.



NUKE is written in Python, and it exports a C/C++ Arduino project that runs on the ArbotiX. NUKE can be downloaded from our Google code site: http://code.google.com/p/arbotix/downloads/list. Documentation is also on that site.

We also have a new google group for support (it's very new, hence the low traffic) http://groups.google.com/group/robocontroller

-Fergs

Coming Soon: NUKE, and other ramblings....

It's been a bit quiet here, but that means stuff is getting done. NUKE: the Nearly Universal Kinematics Engine under development throughout this fall is nearing release -- a beta version should be out this weekend! This is the same software that powered all 3 of the winners of CNRG's Walker Challenge.

As we approach release, I've been adding a number of things into my code. Most people have probably noticed that I've putting a voltage divider circuit onto an analog port to measure the battery level (LiPOs don't like low voltage levels...). Up at CNRG, I had a bit of "duh, why didn't I think of that" moment when Jon Hylands suggested using the AX-12's onboard voltage measurement. So, without further ado, here's a snippet of code from Jon that will save your LiPOs (it's also at the startup of the default NUKE sketch):

float voltage = (ax12GetRegister (1, AX_PRESENT_VOLTAGE, 1)) / 10.0;
Serial.print ("System Voltage: ");
Serial.print (voltage);
Serial.println (" volts.");
if (voltage < 10.0)
    while(1); 

If you are running this code at startup, you'll want at least a 1000ms delay beforehand, or you won't get a real voltage reading.

-Fergs

CNRG Report, And A New Robot

So, Issy didn't fare so well in the Fire Fighting competition, he had a hard time staying off the walls, and in the one run he made it into the room his power connection broke off -- as they say at NASA, we've had an anomaly.

However, Issy did win the walker challenge, with an awesome time of 17sec.


2 other ArbotiX powered walkers took 2nd and 3rd in the walker challenge, so it was an awesome weekend for Vanadium. The bot that took 3rd was only finished minutes before the competition, we used NUKE to put an IK based gait on it less than an hour before game time, in the end, there wasn't enough time left to get the sensors mounted so it did the course with dead reckoning.

Since CNRG, I've been cleaning up NUKE code, and working on the Mammalian 3DOF template. I'm working on a new walker inspired by Little Dog, he's about 2/3 scale:




As for NUKE, a beta release should be out in 2-3 weeks, it'll be Alpha-release available via SVN late next week. We're shooting for PyPose V1.1 with NUKE to be out in early January.

-Fergs