Makelangelo 3 robots ship fully assembled and tested by us, and as part of the quality guarantee I’ve been drawing a lot of pictures. I’ve also been experimenting with ways to improve the machine. These are experimental ideas that may make it into the next model. (more…)
MATR-0001 Simmer Shape is the perfect plastic for makers. Drop it in simmering hot water to make it soften and turn clear. Take it out with a fork and shape it like soft clay. As it cools it hardens and turns white again. Heat and reshape it as much as you like. Often faster than waiting for the 3D printer, and biodegradable!
Here’s a closer view of shaping it by hand.
This weekend the micromouse maze Luke painted and assembled part of the maze. Now we’re looking for a laser trigger to time the races, and I’ll start documenting my micromouse robot build.
A question for you: What is the best time of the year to run this contest again in the fall/winter? We want to work with your schedule so that your students can build a robot as part of their course work.
Today’s monday update is about Micromouse 3, Makelangelo 7.3.4, Arm 3, and VR.
In a previous post I told you about the track we’re building.
The walls and floor are getting painted. We estimate the track is 85% done. In the photo above you can see the micromouse maze walls and pegs slot fitting together. We’ll be able to set up practice tracks at VHS before the event and the full track on the day of the event. Register your contest entry free right now!
Over the weekend Makelangelo software has a small upgrade to 7.3.4. The “start”, “start at line #”, “top”, “left”, “right”, “bottom”, and “go home” buttons are now automatically disabled until you hit the home button. This is to prevent user error at the start – they’re not meaningful if the robot hasn’t already found it’s starting home position.
I’ve been cleaning stuff under the hood for the next 7.4.0 update. Until now converting a picture automatically places the picture in one place on the drawing robot. The improvements move everything to one coordinate system and one scale. This means that the code for each conversion style more concise because the style converter doesn’t need to translate between machine coordinate system and image coordinate system. It also opens the door to moving, scaling, flipping, and rotating images before converting to lines. Who knows? Maybe someone will add Photoshop style layers and an undo/redo system.
Here are some of the style conversion options, all using a picture of an owl’s eye.
All these styles are in the Makelangelo software already. You can download Makelangelo today.
My long term project is the next robot arm. Here’s an early draft, cutaway in Fusion360 to show the inside of the wrist.
The goal is a ~100cm arm with 2kg lift and +/-0.5mm repeatable accuracy. No easy task! It also has to have all wires hidden inside so that it has a good ingress protection rating. When it’s ready it will ship fully assembled, like all Marginally Clever robots, and it will be driven from Robot Overlord.
If you’re a long time follower then you know my last arm used two electric pistons, much like a backhoe you’d see at a construction site. Now I need some help with a math problem: how do I maximize the range of motion?
Making robots easier to use is always high on my list of priorities. I want to program the Arm by pushing and pulling the real machine. But what if I don’t have the real machine in front of me yet? It would be pretty sweet if I could just push and pull a virtual model. It seems to me VR would be a natural fit. When I look at the choices out there, I’m being offered only awful choices.
You can get more up-to-the-second news from Marginally Clever if you follow me on Instagram.
Monday again and I’ve got hot fresh tasty news about the micromouse contest.
Last week I posted about making the floor of the micromouse maze. Since then we had some exciting moments figuring out how to make the walls and pegs.
Luke designed a jig that sits on the sled for the table saw and makes it easy to get the exact groove cut needed for the pegs. We tried to make the pegs from 1/2″ birch ply but the material was too brittle and chipped to shreds. In the video above you can see we’ve switched to MDF.
To keep manufacturing simple we used the exact same groove on the wall pieces. The gap between each peg and wall is 3mm thick, 5cm tall, and 6mm wide. As it turns out, a laser cut piece of acrylic is a perfect fit. The acrylic comes with a protective layer on both sides. The layer adds just enough material to make the fit snug so we won’t need any glue. Excellent!
Having a system to make walls and pegs is great. How many do we actually need to make? The rules say there are 16×16 rooms with a wall around the outside edge. That means there are 17 * 17 = 289 pegs. What about walls?
Well, there are 16 wall segments to go across and 16+1 rows of walls, so that’s 16×17 for just the horizontal walls. times that by two to get the maximum number of walls, that’s 16x17x2 = 544.
In reality there won’t need to be so many walls. Every room has to be reachable from at least one other room. The easiest way to draw this would be a snaking S shape.
Now it’s easy to count them out. There are 16×4 wall pieces around the outside, and 15×15 pieces inside the maze. That’s 289 wall segments. Funny coincidence: that’s the same number of pegs!
Next step is to paint everything regulation colors and get a timing system to record each race.
A big hello to everyone from Makerfair joining us for the first time. Hello!
Follow me on instagram if you want a to see the acylic pieces as they’re being made.
