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New lower price on RUMBA control boards

2014-05-26 Dan

RUMBA controllers are now $34 CAD more affordable! Thanks to your support we’ve been able to leverage the power of bulk buying to bring the price way, way down.

RUMBA controllers are used in all our robots as a one-stop-shop solution. They can drive up to six stepper motors at once AND have all the added bells and whistles you need to run a 3D printer. You could move a machine in three directions and still have enough connections to add three extruders. Three!

Now it’s more affordable than ever to build your next amazing robot.

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Stewart Platform on the new SpaceX Dragon v2

2014-05-29 Dan

dragon v2

Watch the video here

I would embed the video directly but livestream’s player is really surprisingly stupid.

If you watch closely starting at the 4:45 mark you’ll see the nose cone for Dragon v2 open and a device stick out to grab onto the space station. That device is a stewart platform, able to make the tiniest adjustments and extert a tremendous amount of power to gently align the Dragon with the station so the airlocks can seal together seamlessly.

Also at 13:26 you’ll see a grey joystick in the center of the control console. That joystick is also a Stewart Platform. The 6 degrees of freedom of the stick allows the pilot to intuitively translate and/or rotate the ship in any direction. I wonder if the surface is also clickable?

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Building a 5DOF robot arm 1

2014-05-29 Dan

forearm2

It’s pretty rare that I get 6 uninterrupted hours. I’m pretty sure I spent most of the time trying not to bite my nails, which is what happens when I’m working on a really hard problem. Let’s take a tour of where I’m going here and what’s changed.
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