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[Ivan] seems to enjoy making 3D printed vehicles with tracks. His latest one uses 50 servo motors to draw patterns in the sand at the beach. You can see it work in the video below. Well, more accurately you can see it not work and then work as the first iteration didn’t go exactly as planned.

An Arduino Mega 2560 provides the brains and the whole unit weighs in at almost 31 pounds, including the batteries. We didn’t see Ivan’s design files, although it wouldn’t be hard to do your own take on the robot.

Speaking of the weight, we were amused at [Ivan’s] quick and dirty trailer he built to haul the thing around. We wondered if he had those wheels sitting around or if he had to source them from somewhere for this project.

The robot more or less moves in a straight line and the servos either drag a pointy part into the sand or lift the pointy part up so the sand is undisturbed in that area. The robot isn’t perfect. Not only did it not work the first time, but it also looked like it dropped at least one pointy part during the second test run. The tracks seemed to provide good traction, but we would not want to bet that the motion was completely straight.

On the other hand, it did get the job done. It was a lot of wiring and we suspect that’s why it was made all in one piece. Making it break down into sections would have been nice for transport. You might even be able to make it take a varying number of sections if you did it right. However, it would take a lot of connectors and a way for those connectors to support the weight of the beam, so that would be a much tougher problem.

We wish the design files were posted, but we still thought this was a neat enough idea and easy enough to figure out. We aren’t likely to build a 30-pound robot, but we might think about replicating it on a smaller scale to take to our local beach next summer.

We couldn’t help but remember Skryf, the robot that didn’t draw in the sand but drew with sand. Then there’s also  SandBot.

Ivan Miranda has come up with a novel method for drawing messages in the sand, using a tread assembly that prints as it travels along the beach.

The robot uses a length of square tubing to connect a pair of half tanks, with 50 SG90 micro servos spaced out on the bottom. As it pulls itself, the motors are controlled with a total of three Arduino Mega boards, intermittently extending into the sand. This creates lines that combine to form individual letters.

You can see the build process in the video below, including his initial trial at around the 11:00 mark. This is actually Miranda’s second attempt at a “beach drawer,” and his first version, which uses a much different technique is seen here.

Lug
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Lego Drawing Machine Draws Block Shapes Best

arduino hacks, drawing bot, drawing robot, LEGO, lego robot Commenti disabilitati su Lego Drawing Machine Draws Block Shapes Best 

Lego-drawing machine

Loving to draw but deathly afraid of pen ink, [Marcel] came up with a little drawing machine made out of Lego that will do it for him. It’s not a very complicated build but it does have several different components arranged such to complete a task, and that in itself is cool. Oh yeah, just kidding about the “afraid of pen ink” thing.

RC Car Servos are used to drive the pen in the X and Y directions. These servos only have a 180 degree range of motion which is not enough to move the pen very far. To increase the pen’s travel distance, [Marcel] attached a large gear to the servo which rotates a much smaller gear that rides on a rack gear attached to the bed. A Lego hinge takes the place of a Z axis and is used to set the height of the pen that is strapped to the machine via rubber band.

In order to make the machine draw, the user moves an analog joystick. The changing resistance values of the joystick’s potentiometers are measured by an Arduino. The Arduino then moves each servo to the appropriate position using PWM. If you’d like to know how to do this, check out the Knob Tutorial.

If you’re not ready to l’eggo your Lego drawing machines, check out this super complicated creation or this arm emulator that draws the Mona Lisa.

 


Filed under: Arduino Hacks


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