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!
“How Hard Can It Be” is a new DIYer show on the National Geographic Channel this Sunday, October 2nd, at 8 pm. The show stars Vin Marshall, Paul Carson, and Eric Gocke as they create outlandish projects like the UP house, a homemade rocket, and a robo-sub. Check out the video, it looks awe-some!
At this year’s Maker Faire Bay Area, there were robots of all kinds! Enjoy a few snapshots of our robotic friends, taken by Gregory Hayes.
Here, automata guru Dug North rounds up four expedient methods for improvising a worm drive given an on-hand spur gear. Digging through our archives also reveals this interesting method for coming at the problem from the other direction, i.e. improvising a spur gear for an on-hand worm!
Inspired by Hektor the spraycan robot and following in the footsteps of the AS220 Drawbot and Harvey Moon’s Drawing Machine, Edinburgh maker Sandy Nobel’s Polargraph puts a spin on the hanging drawing machine. Using a dual-polar coordinate system instead of the standard cartesian gives the machine its unique name and particular style.
Mark Edelman from NorCalFTC shows the competition area for a yearly teen program in robotics. At Maker Faire Bay Area 2011, student teams used their engineering and technology skills to pit their creations against one another in the final tech challenge.
A Seattle organization called Xbot Robotics held a workshop where students built robots using MicroRAX girders and NXT microcontroller bricks. I love the top photo above with the mecanum wheels; all three were built by the students. The introductory lesson for how to build a four-wheel chassis included the purpose and structure of a chassis, […]
Robert Beatty sent us these wonderful pictures of his daughters, “Lunamoth” and “Julajay,” building robots. His “maker girls,” as he calls them, have been “involved in the designing, soldering, electronics, metal fabrication, programming, and naming of the robots, and testing, with Dad guiding the way. We really enjoy it.”
