Planet Arduino

[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.

NYC beaches are where tropical beaches addicted to meth go to die. So says [Vije Miller] in his write-up for his Arduino sand matrix printer. It’s a clever idea, five servo-operated cardboard plungers that indent a pattern of dots in the sand as the device is pulled forward, resulting in something not unlike a dot matrix printer that can write messages in the sand.

He’s submitted it to us as a Fail Of The Week, because it doesn’t do a very good job of writing in the sand, and it’s burned out a servo. But we feel this isn’t entirely fair, because whether or not it has delivered the goods it’s still an excellent build. Cardboard isn’t a material we see much of here at Hackaday, but in this case he’s mastered it in a complex mechanism that while it may have proved a little too flexible for the job in hand is nevertheless a rather impressive piece of work.

You can see a brief video below the break showing it in action. He tells us his motivation has waned on this project, and expresses the hope that others will take up the baton and produce a more viable machine.

This may be our first sand matrix printer, but it’s not our first sand 3D printer.

Fail of the Week is a Hackaday column which celebrates failure as a learning tool. Help keep the fun rolling by writing about your own failures and sending us a link to the story — or sending in links to fail write ups you find in your Internet travels.