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!
It rolls on tracks instead of walking, but this ditch-witch style tracked chassis retrofit with a pair of giant waldos is pretty much the power loader from Aliens. This video showing it in action is a great news segment from Ed Yeates of Utah’s KSL-TV, right up to the point where they start talking about the system as an “equalizer” opening up jobs to women “that might’ve otherwise been closed just based on strength issues.”
First Chess, then Jeopardy, now the Rubic’s Cube. Mike Dobson and David Gilday’s CubeStormer II Rubic’s Cube solving robot successfully beat Australian Feliks Zemdegs’ 5.66 second record by solving a cube in a mere 5.352 seconds. The feat was accomplished using four LEGO Mindstorm NXT kits controlled by a Samsung Galaxy S II smartphone. The Singularity is near, I tell ya.
Caspian Maclean of Perth, Australia, built his “limb embiggener” out of bamboo stakes and a bicycle brake. It still seems much easier then the original skeletonics system that inspired me, and more sturdy than my previous mechanical arm. Hopefully there’s enough information to give anyone a good start to making one. The Artifactory had all […]
“Judy Castro doesn’t have a background in engineering. But with Arduino, she doesn’t need one to make her sculptures move, light up or breathe fire. The San Francisco artist uses the microcontroller and software program to create interactive works of art — something she once might have paid an electrical engineer thousands of dollars to do.”…
Andy Cavatora and friends built these gravity harps for a Björk concert currently playing in the U.K. It looks like each pendulum has a servo-controlled rotation system that changes what note gets plunked at the pendulum’s nadir.
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The R2D2 Builder’s Club brings one of the world’s most beloved fictional robots to life. Steve Simmons and his hobby roboticist club use fabrication, programming, and remote controls to build exact replicas of R2D2. Their R2’s are quirky friends who roamed Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 delighting everyone they encountered.
Randy Sarafan started Simple Bots on a bet. A coworker wanted a simple introduction to robotics, so Randy set out to prove that he could build a functioning robot in ten minutes. This was the impetus for a family of bots shown at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 that can be easily made from a variety of parts that are on hand for the average DIY enthusiast.
