Month: February 2013

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HOG Drive Preview

In the last episode our hero showed you a video of someone else’s HOG drive and posted some pictures of a not-yet-working 3D printed model on Thingiverse. In this nail biting scene we flip the Giant Lever and test the full destructive power of this fully oper- wait a minute. Ah, you know what I mean.

I’m working on a line-following robot for the next VRC club contest and I needed a way to drive fast using the stuff I already had in stock. Now if I can get these QRD1114s wired up I should be most of the way home…

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Hemispherical Omnidirectional Gimballed Drive aka HOG Drive now on Thingiverse

The Vancouver Robotics Club is having a contest to build line following robots. I thought it was a great excuse to get creative and use up some old parts I had lying around so I build a HOG Drive. You can find the parts list and 3D printables on Thingiverse.

The big inspiration came from Curtis Boirum when I read this Hackaday post a while ago. I couldn’t believe no one else had made a DIY kit of it and jumped on the opportunity.

This remote-controlled car is fast, just what I need to win. Even better, you can put two on the same RC car and get a vehicle that can go sideways or turn on the spot. Sweet!

This model is a prototype. It will go through a few revisions to work out the kinks and then it will be available as a kit right here for you. I’m just so excited I couldn’t sit on it and keep my mouth shut until the thing is finished.

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Cleaning Github

Until now all my projects have been http://github.com/i-make-robots/[project name]
I’m moving them all to http://github.com/MarginallyClever/[project name]
for example, http://github.com/MarginallyClever/Makelangelo is the new URL for github.com/i-make-robots/Drawbot
If you find a dead link I didn’t catch, please let me know. Thank you!

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Chinese Spring Festival Dragon on Makelangelo 2

Gung Hey Fa Choi. I found a picture of a neat looking dragon. When I loaded it into the makelangelo software it produced a wild zigzag pattern and that’s what we drew. Special thanks to Alec and Marc-Andre for their help in making this video. Makelangelo 2 parts are on their way from China right now and should be here in time for the launch, fingers crossed.

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Makelangelo GUI v0.9.2

I’ve made some improvements to the Makelangelo software today. No firmware update required.
– “drive manually” interface is now part of the main window and includes a speed setting.
– “configure limits” screen is simplified to only 4 values (used to be 2) and now works in millimeters. No need to change your software if you’ve already configured your machine.
– Minor internal changes for Makelangelo v2.
– “Pause” now lifts the pen and “unpause” lowers it again (if necessary)
– GUI can be configured in “Preferences” to play a sound when certain events happen (like finish processing an image or finish drawing)
– Windows users will find a start32.bat and start64.bat. Please use the one appropriate for your system.

Windows users please let me know if you have any challenges whatsoever in running the software. I’d like it to be as flawless and bulletproof as possible in windows and I need your help to make it so.

In other news I got the boxes for the Makelangelo 2 today and they look damn fine, if I do say so myself. White die-cut instead of brown looks so much more professional. What do you think – should I include string and a USB cable along with all the other stuff? I’m wondering just how “complete” this package should be.