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Archive for the ‘Motors’ Category

There are three types of motors that makers typically consider: stepper motors, servo motors, and DC motors (either brushed or brushless). Stepper motors are great when you need high precision and torque, but tend to have jerky movement. DC motors work well for high speed movement that doesn’t need any rotational accuracy. Servo motors are somewhat of a compromise between the two. But Aaed Musa’s 3D-printed continuous rotation servo motor is even better, because it is fast, smooth, and accurate.

This motor works like a standard servo motor, so you can set it to any desired position. But it features continuous rotation, an integrated gearbox to improve torque, very smooth movement, and a magnetic encoder to ensure accurate positioning. As you can see in the video, it responds almost instantly, moves fast, and isn’t jittery at all. Because all of the mechanical parts are 3D-printed, durability may be a concern. But otherwise this is a very attractive option.

Musa designed this to work with a 600RPM DC gear motor. He then further reduced the output with a 3D-printed gearbox designed in Autodesk Fusion 360. An Arduino Uno board controls the motor through a BTS7960 motor driver and monitors the position with an AS5600 magnetic encoder. The total build cost should be around $30, not including the cost of the Arduino. More details on the project can be found in Muse’s Instructables write-up.

The post 3D-printed continuous rotation servo motor is super smooth appeared first on Arduino Blog.

[Ty Palowski] doesn’t like folding his many shirts. He saw one of those boards on TV that supposedly simplifies folding, but it does require you to manually move the board. That just won’t do, so [Ty] motorized it to create a shirt folding robot.

The board idea is nothing new, and probably many people wouldn’t mind the simple operation required, but what else are you going to do with your 3D printer but make motor mounts for a shirt folding machine. The folding board is, of course, too big for 3D printing so he made that part out of cardboard at first and then what looks like foam board.

The side “wings” were easy to manipulate, but the top fold required a little more effort. The machine still requires a manual fold at the end and, of course, you have to put the shirt on the right way for things to work out.

Honestly, we aren’t sure this is a very practical project, but we still enjoyed the idea and we can’t deny it seems to work. We don’t think there’s much torque required so we wondered if some beefy RC servos would have been just as effective and probably a lot easier to work with. Still, just about anything that could move would work. You could probably even use a spring and a solenoid to get the same effect. There’s not much build detail, but we think you could figure it out using whatever motors you happen to have on hand.

If you find laundry too time-consuming, there’s always Eleven. If you want a better folding robot, you’ll have to put in some serious work.

The first thing to notice about [Bijuo]’s cat-sized quadruped robot designs (link is in Korean, Google translation here) is how slim and sleek the legs are. That’s because unlike most legged robots, the limbs themselves don’t contain any motors. Instead, the motors are in the main body, with one driving a half-circle pulley while another moves the limb as a whole. Power is transferred by a cable acting as a tendon and is offset by spring tension in the joints. The result is light, slim legs that lift and move in a remarkable gait.

[Bijuo] credits the Cheetah_Cub project as their original inspiration, and names their own variation Mini Serval, on account of the ears and in keeping with the feline nomenclature. Embedded below are two videos, the first showing leg and gait detail, and the second demonstrating the robot in motion.

There’s more than one way to make a robot cat, of course, and here’s another design that doesn’t completely evict motors from the limbs, but still manages to keep them looking sleek and nimble.

[via Let’s Make Robots]

The first thing to notice about [Bijuo]’s cat-sized quadruped robot designs (link is in Korean, Google translation here) is how slim and sleek the legs are. That’s because unlike most legged robots, the limbs themselves don’t contain any motors. Instead, the motors are in the main body, with one driving a half-circle pulley while another moves the limb as a whole. Power is transferred by a cable acting as a tendon and is offset by spring tension in the joints. The result is light, slim legs that lift and move in a remarkable gait.

[Bijuo] credits the Cheetah_Cub project as their original inspiration, and names their own variation Mini Serval, on account of the ears and in keeping with the feline nomenclature. Embedded below are two videos, the first showing leg and gait detail, and the second demonstrating the robot in motion.

There’s more than one way to make a robot cat, of course, and here’s another design that doesn’t completely evict motors from the limbs, but still manages to keep them looking sleek and nimble.

[via Let’s Make Robots]

HeboconMadrid_1

Being a dumb and clumsy robot has never been as fun as in the stupid robots competition Hebocon. This competition series is described as “robot contests for the technically ungifted” by its creator Daiju Ishikawa, and encourages anyone to join with no prior knowledge of robotics necessary.

HeboconMadrid_2

HeboconMadrid_3

What’s neat is that unlike other awards, Hebocon’s are symbolic as they are usually made out of recycled parts from every robot in the competition!

So far there have been two editions of Hebocon in Spain (Valencia and Makespace Madrid) where our very own David Cuartielles participated as a judge.

Last weekend, Cuartielles was invited to the Hebocon World Championship in Tokyo where he served on the judging panel alongside Nifty’s Dr. Kunio Matsui and an executive from NicoTsuku (a company dedicated to digital communities). The event drew a total of 32 robots from all across the world, including the United States, Hong Kong, Iceland, France, Singapore, Greece, Taiwan and Japan.

The winners were:

Nifty Award: An unusual car with a spinning doll that shot fake banknotes

NicoTsuku Award: A robot with a middle-age man that turned a table upside down (a literal representation of a Japanese colloquial expression that means getting mad)

Arduino/Genuino Award: A crocodile robot made by a 10-year-old that previously participated in Maker Faire Tokyo

The ‘Remote-Controlled Robot’ from Hong Kong won the sumo competition and it was about fooling the opponent by switching the roles of the remote control and the robot.

Arduino_Hebocon_2016

HeboconTokyo_2016_Participants

Hebocon Tokyo 2016 Trophy made by Daiju Ishikawa's 4 year old son.

Thanks for inviting us to Hebocon’s World Championship 2016! Check out more on Twitter! 

We recently went through a significant refactoring of the Bricktronics software libraries for Arduino (and other platforms). The all-encompassing library was split into separate sub-libraries, one for each motor and sensor type, plus one library for the Bricktronics Shield and Megashield. We’re calling this new set of software libraries “Bricktronics v1.2”.

Highlights of the changes include:

  • Complete API documentation for each library
  • Addition of two new sensors: Color sensor and Light sensor
  • Addition of better PID control for motors, including position control, angle control, as well as brake/coast functionality
  • New examples for the new motor API functionality
  • Now easier to use the individual libraries with other platforms such as ChipKit, Teensy, etc
  • All library dependencies (such as required 3rd party libraries) are clearly mentioned in all examples and Readme files, including links and installation directions.

This is the list of the new individual Bricktronics software libraries. Unfortunately they are not compatible with the original libraries, but since they are better in every way, we strong recommend everyone upgrade to these new v1.2 libraries.

We still have more website updates to make, including new photos, new examples, new demonstration videos, and new hardware(!) but we want to let you know about the new software libraries because we’re really proud of them. Please let us know what you think in the W&L Forum.

HappyD_Staedtische_gallery_Bremen

Happy Days is an installation inspired by the work of the Irish avant-garde novelist Samuel Beckett who wrote the namesake play in two acts in the 60s. Designer and visual artist Irena Kukric created it in collaboration with Canny Sutanto and the aim of exploring narrative in the form of an installation. The five-minute play is staged using ten servo motors and a DC motor with an Arduino Mega and VVVV live programming environment:

We were beginners with Arduino and motors so we started out pretty basic, trying to move several motors at once. We decided to use VVVV platform in addition when we realized we needed a timeline for our script for the play. With this timeline, it was easier to deal with details such as when we want to move which motor under which angle and such. For beginners with coding, this visual programming environment is very approachable and the entrance level is much lower.

It is easier and faster to get to your desired outcome. What is great about VVVV and Arduino is that there is the Firmata library that enables you to work with both platforms in conjunction so even artists and designers with lower level coding skills are able to go from concept to realization quite easy. We used Arduino Mega which was very convenient considering the number of our motors and the pins that Mega has to offer. After we had our final order of cables and pins, we even made our own shield for it.

The play was staged without human actors or conventional (verbal) dialogue  as performing a ritual in the play overshadows the performer, the object of the ritual can survive on its own. Therefore, they used these objects or rather props from the play and made them actors, animating them with motors, as you can see in the video below:

 

Photo: Hep Svadja3D-print this 1872 replica Electro-Magnetic Engine that works like your drone's modern motors.

Read more on MAKE

The post Ye Olde Brushless Motor appeared first on Make: DIY Projects, How-Tos, Electronics, Crafts and Ideas for Makers.

Giu
08

Building a quadcopter running on Arduino Yún

arduino, Arduino Yún, Drones, Featured, Motors, OpenWrt, PID, Yun Commenti disabilitati su Building a quadcopter running on Arduino Yún 

Comelicottero

Comelicottero is a quadcopter based on Arduino Yún created during the Master in Computer Science at the Universita’ degli Studi of Milan (Italy) by Simone Castellani, Giovanni Intorre and Andrea Toscano:

The idea was to build a drone able to be controlled through WiFi from any PC, tablet or smartphone . Comelicottero is equipped with an accelerometer and a gyroscope for the stability obtained by a PID-based control system. Since Servo library is too slow for the quadcopter dynamics, an hardware PWM was implemented to obtain a 400Hz PWM signal.

The communication between the ground station on a PC and the quadcopter relies on WiFi and, in order to get better results, Bridge library was replaced with an efficient python script on OpenWRT-Yun. On top of that all the code was written to maximise Arduino Yún capabilities. The Navigation System has been designed, simulated on PC, implemented and tested. The autonomous navigation is going through an additional testing due to magnetometer interferences with motors’ magnetic field.

The user can control and monitor data coming from the drone using a gamepad attached to a laptop with a custom software installed.

Comelicottero_PC_Ground_Station

The sketch and all the documentation will be soon available on GitHub and released with GNU license. In the meanwhile follow their Youtube Channel for updates.

 

Comelicottero_Wiring

Ott
31

Control Large DC Motors with Arduino

Actuators, arduino, arduino uno, dc, Featured, motor, Motors, tutorial, video Commenti disabilitati su Control Large DC Motors with Arduino 

dcmotors

Arduino boards are able to control small motors very easily and it’s just as easy when you have to deal with controlling large motors. In the following video tutorial by NYC CNC you’ll see two examples. In the first you’ll learn how to get up and running, to start, stop, control direction and speed of a large motor with Arduino Uno. In the second example, how to use two proximity sensors as limit switches and two potentiometers to allow on-the-fly speed adjustment.



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