I’ve had a dumb idea clonking around in my head for at least a decade: a jigsaw puzzle for the blind. When I was young I would see carved stone reliefs and wish I could touch them. I thought the blind might really enjoy them. When I joined the reddit puzzle exchange my giftee asked for a jigsaw and I knew: it was time.
Added an SSL certificate. Surf in private, shop with confidence.
Added an R&D subforum. This is for people stuck on a robotics challenge that need a bit of help. I’ve listed 4 items to start it off.
Added “Learn” to our top level menu that will take you to our education Wiki.
Adding a new product banner every day of the work week until they’re all done.
Hooray for small victories! One step at a time.
Special thanks to VHS member “Robbat2” for his amazing linux know how. You rock!
The latest version of PancakeBot is coming to the Paris MakerFaire. Did you know it uses GcodeSender and a version of our GcodeCNCDemo code? I’d love to show you some of the other tasty morsels Miguel has been sharing with me but I have to wait until he gives the OK.
If you’ve followed the story so far from the beginning you’ll know that I have been building a program to simulate and train my robot arms. In the program there are virtual copies of my real robots. The real and virtual models are be synchronized 1:1 when connected.
It looks like the virtual robots in my simulator now have collision detection: they understand when they are touching each other. That means I can make sure that the real robots are incapable of slamming into each other by giving the virtual robots more personal space than the real robots. I’ve already made sure that they can’t bend in impossible ways or go through the table. Now kids can drive the robot with relative safety – as long as they don’t get in it’s way, there shouldn’t be any accidents.
Get update 14 of the open source code from Github.
Next step is to record & playback animations.
Frankly, I’m kind of amazed at the framerate I’m getting for brute-force OpenGL graphics in Java in Debug mode. I still remember using assembler code to draw triangles one pixel at a time in mode 13h.
I’m hacking a vending machine to take BitCoins and I’ve made my work open source. Read all about it and get the code
