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!
I love the extent to which people are… er… thinking outside the bot in pursuing ideas beyond the standard layered cake approach to CDbots. In the first vid above, YouTube member eschulma shows a folding three-CD design using one full-size CD, two mini-CDs, and two attachment points, to create a folding CD assembly. Fascinated to […]
Lubbock, Texas artist Dustin Wallace, whose larger one-off/limited edition transforming robot sculptures I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, also makes these wicked little “robotagami” dudes that are CNC-cut from sheet metal (stainless steel or copper), ship flat, and get slotted together and folded up to make a dimensional figure by the buyer.
Delta robots use their parallel linkages to maintain a level end effector. This means they’re perfect for placing objects in factory settings and for looking awesome all the time. This one’s running on Arduino.
Ãœbernerdy Swiss lighter-than-air fish that flies with electronic muscles? What’s not to like? The actuators on the airship work – like biological muscles – in an agonist-antagonist configuration. While the actuators on one side of the airship are activated, the corresponding actuator on the other side contracts. Thus the body and tail fin are excited […]
If you’re participating in our awe-inspiring MAKE Robot Build contest, you should know that Steve Joiner and his sons Noah and Jamie have set the bar with their excellent coasterbot, HUL-10. (You may remember we posted a super-cute video showing Noah describing the various components of the bot.) Not only does HUL-10 do a great […]
I seem to find myself saying something like this a lot these days: “We’ve seen this idea before, but, dang, this person is good at it.” Well, here goes again: We’ve seen this idea before, but dang, Andrea Petrachi (aka Himatic) is good at it. Andrea’s junkbot figurines are made from, well, junk, but he seems to have a particular flair for the use of old camera parts.
In the latest Make: Robot Build Newsletter, Matt Mets wrote a piece introducing motor controllers and linked to an ITP article on using an L293NE motor controller. In the Robot Build area of the MAKE Forums, Alan Kilian pointed us to this other excellent tutorial, Control Your Motors with L293D, on Let’s Make Robots. It […]
