Making a robot can be an incredibly rewarding experience. It’s the perfect combination of creativity, engineering and problem solving. However, if you’re just getting started in robotics, it can also be overwhelming. To make things easier for those who are just starting out, we’ve put together some tips and tricks to help makers bring robots to life! From the basics of assembling your robot to software implementation, these pointers will give you everything you need to get started on your robotic adventure!
We have done both gear- and gear-making-related roundups before, but our gear world has turned (bam!) quite a few times since then, and we’ve covered some even hotter gear action in the interim. Someday there’s going to be a gear-roundup roundup. But for now, here’s our top gear content as it stands today:
Idahoan Dean Williams used to make a living by repairing vintage mechanical cameras. If you’ve ever pulled your hair out trying to replace a small spring that hasn’t been manufactured since the factory was bombed by Göring’s Luftwaffe, you may be interested in his well-documented DIY method. Dean’s trick for annealing them inside a wad of steel wool in a toaster oven is worth a click all by itself. His entire site, in fact, will likely be of interest to those who appreciate close mechanical work.
They call it “juggling,” which, I must say, in deference to all the jugglers out there: it ain’t. But “catch” is still an extremely impressive addition to the extremely impressive list of extremely impressive stunts which quadrotor UAVs have been pulling off recently. Filmed at the Flying Machine Arena research facility at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. [via adafruit]
Frits and Rik are back with another episode of The Latest in Hobby Robotics! Find out about the coolest projects this week: LineIronBot (Hacked Iron Line Follower) by isotope Companion Bot by Emma Party Popper Alarm Clock by unigamer MontyPythonSillyWalkBot by TotoroYamada Subscribe to the MAKE Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or […]
Four students from the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, ON, created this clever 6′ telepresence robot, called TIPI — pronounced tippy?
akiyukyi’s brick sorter uses a digital scale and a webcam to sort bricks into broad categories like gears, Technic beams, plates, and so on. [Via The NXT Step]
From a group of what seem to be mostly Italian scientists with the delightfully ominous name of The Octopus Project. Construction details were published as Design of a Biomimetic Robotic Octopus Arm in Bioinspiration & Biomimetics in 2009. A 2008 conference preprint is available here.
