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Bert forks Makelangelo and builds a new pen holder

Bert Balcaen says,

“I was impatient and made my own parts suitable for laser cutting. See https://github.com/bertbalcaen/DrawBot/tree/master/printable-parts for spools, motor mounts and pen holder. Motor mounts are based on your design, spools were inspired by http://stuartchilds.com/2012/07/drbo-thread-spool-assembly/. I did a write up here: http://www.iaacblog.com/mai2012-2013-physicalcomputing/2012/12/drawing-machine-prototype/

Thanks for opensourcing this project – great work!”

Meanwhile I’m designing a robot gripper and waiting for china to deliver my bobbins.

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Underactuated Adaptive Robot Gripper Finger, v1

Here’s what I’ve been working on today. R&D is a long, difficult process, but I like a challenge. Case in point, I’ve been stuck on trying to design a 6DOF robot arm for ages. It occurred to me that I’m starting at the shoulder and trying to work towards the hand. What if I start at the hand and work back toward the shoulder? So I’m making a robot gripper inspired by Robotiq’s 2 and 3 finger grippers. They’re underactuated because they have fewer motors than degrees of freedom and they’re adaptive because they can deal with gripping odd shapes.

This was a failed print. I printed six tests before I got two that worked, and stopped in the middle to check a few potential problems. My 3D printer needs a lot of good lovin’ to work. Still worth it.

Here’s a close up. The strings will probably be replaced with 50lb fishing line. There’s one on either side running down the groove in the middle of the finger.

Here it is again, to scale. I’ll probably reprint each “bone” as a single piece, rather than two separate halves. I still need a way to keep the strings in place and to add some touch-sensitive pads to detect contact. I also need to hook these to a servo and make at least one more. All in all I’ll be lucky if I get a beta working in less than 6 prototypes.

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Steven’s Makelangelo Progress Pics

Steven printed pictures for his nephew’s birthday party. Who doesn’t love Super Mario?

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Makelangelo software, simplified

The biggest issue with the Makelangelo is that starting the software is a pain. To make things a little easier I’ve made two important changes.

1. The “experimental” branch has been removed. When I’m ready with a new update I’ll publish it to master from now on. If I decide to start a Makelangelo 2.0 then I’ll make a branch called v1.0.
2. The /java folder now has an /OSX folder and a /Windows folder. Go to the appropriate folder for your computer and run the start file. On OSX you might have to increase permissions to run it.

I’d love to make the .jar files even easier to run. So far I’ve invested a lot of time trying to get rid of the start files and achieved nothing. So if someone wants to take on that challenge, please be my guest.

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This holiday season I would love some debugging help.

The Makelangelo software has had a little touch up for the holidays and should be a little easier to run now. The “configure limits” screen how has a visual aid. The OSX edition has a start.command you can double click to run the program. I’m looking for someone who’s running Windows to help me smooth out the software issues by running some usability tests. All you have to do is try to run the software and tell me if either of these methods work:
– double click the DrawbotGUI.jar in /java/windows
– double click the start.bat in /java/windows
If it doesn’t work, what happens?
For you windows pros, please tell me what happens if you run start.bat from the console.
If I can sort this out I can then update the documentation and make things easier for everyone.