Marcel was busy over the weekend using the hacklab CNC mill to make some pretty cool embosing dice.
He has written an Instructable describing the process.
Robotics: Adaptive Control and Vision
Our robot arm is learning to control itself from optical feedback alone! We connected the Lagadic’s visual servoing platform (ViSP), OpenCVs robust homography estimator and University of Edinburgh’s Locally Weighted Projection Regression (LWPR) adaptive control to create a software stack for a cheap USB robot arm toy and a webcam. The hardware cost about £48, and it took us 6 weekends to connect up cutting edge open source research software. Yes! All this software is free! It’s been paid for already. I hope this article will guide people towards making use of these valuable public domain resources. We used an adaptive control scheme so at no point was robotic geometry measured, and instead the software *learnt* how to move the robot from experience alone.
Motivation
To recap (here and here), our goal is to build high precision robot systems using cheap components, and now we have actually tried a control installation. The existing approach to precision machinery is to spend lots of money on precision steel components and more or less control the machine open loop (without feedback). CNCs are a good example of this where the lead screws are *really* expensive. This approach made sense when we did not have cheap methods of precision feedback, but now we have cheap cameras and cheap computation (thanks smart phones), an alternative method for obtaining precision could be to just to use dodgy mechanics and closed loop control (feedback). Visual feedback is particularly attractive because: its easy to install; it is contactless (so does not affect the motion of the thing you want to control) and it doesn’t wear. With vision you can just slap markers on a mechanical part and off you go (with the appropriate software).
Los Cardos Awakens
After some kerfaffing we finally managed to get our favourite Mexican take away - Los Cardos - to deliver to our new home in Summerhall!
Nom nom nom …
1st Summerhall Burritos
AGM on Tuesday 16th April
Yes, it’s that time of year when the Hacklab and tedium intersect in the Venn diagram region of the Annual General Meeting. The Open Night will therefore be slightly later than usual.
Members, be here at 7pm sharp. Visitors and guests, we plan to have the doors open to you at 9pm.
Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire
Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire took place last Sunday, at Summerhall. Hacklab being on site made it easy for us to get involved.
The centre piece of the lab’s projects was a marble-run with a magnet-based lift belt, based on a previous version installed in the Forest. By Saturday evening the run was starting to take shape, but there was a lot still to be done. After “rapid prototyping” and trying out different ideas the run was completed and briefly tested just as the sun was rising.
As visitors started to arrived the marble run sprung into action. As with the previous version it had a tendency to drop ball bearings once in a while, so the area directly underneath was cordoned off and a “ball picker” equipped a magnet on a stick positioned to retrieve fallen balls. Occasionally a ball lacked speed to negotiate the loop in the run, resulting in a blockage that was again cleared with the help of a magnet.
Gandolf’s Optical Pixalator and Andy’s takeaway carton based Airship attracted attention and discussions with visitors. Peter wondering around with his LED Sombrero perched precariously on his head.
The hacklab was open for vistors and was almost full to capacity on a few occasions. Gary brought along many One Laptop Per Child machines for people to play with. Tom L also did some musical CNC. Some familiar faces dropped by to say hi and a quite a few first time visitors were impressed and we expect to welcome them back on an open night or to a workshop.
Thanks to everybody involved: those who worked on projects, the other exhibitors, Edinburgh Science Festival for doing organisation, and most importantly the visitors who came and made the day a great success. Bring on next year!
Workshop: Candle Making Basics
Creation from the last Candle Making workshop
Following on from the previous Candle Making workshops, we are happy to announce the 3rd running of the workshop. Covering the basics of candle making participants should leave with enough knowledge to try some candle-making of their own. No previous experience is required just come along and have fun.
Areas covered will include:
- Different types of candle and wax
- How to safely melt and pour wax.
- Basic candle making techniques.
- Re-using wax successfully.
Location: Edinburgh Hacklab, Summerhall [Getting There]
Date: Sunday 5th May 2013
Time: 10:30am until about 3:00pm (quite a bit of this time will be spent waiting for wax to cool)
Cost: £5. Including materials, tea and coffee.
Registration: Email peter@greenhac.org.uk if you would like to attend, or have any questions.
Maker Faire is coming to town!
Good news everyone! It’s just over a week until the Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire!
Put Sunday the 7th of April from 10AM in your diary and come down to Summerhall for:
- Robots!
- Electronics!
- 3D printing!
- Flashing lights!
- Skulls!
- Boats!
- Etc!
As the Mini Maker Faire will be at Summerhall (where Hacklab lives), in addition to our stand in the Faire we’ll open the lab for the day. Come down and see some of the projects that have been worked on at the lab and have a chat with some of the members. There’ll be lots going on in the Faire and the lab.
The lab will be open for free entry, the Faire will cost you just £2.50 and is guaranteed to be awesome. Skip the queue and buy your tickets online.
See you there!
Runesketch, now with sketch
So Runesketch was the game we tried to get ready for Make Game Month in November. Sesh! That seems like a long time ago. We tried alpha testing it a bit Feb, but there were not many biters. Its hard to judge what the problem was, was it too hard to find someone to play against? Too hard to work out the rules? Too slow to play the game? Did it look too crap?
Anyway the latest iteration is much closer to our intended game design. The biggest feature is the sketch is in Runesketch! You can draw your own art, and sell it to other players for gold. We wanted a game where creative people could become become top dogs as well as the traditional gamers. If you are a good drawer, you will make so much gold that you will be able to afford the best cards. So there are multiple ways to get gold, win battles, draw art or even speculate on art.
Anyway, we think we are getting somewhere now. The other niggles have hopefully been addressed. There is: a tutorial, a multilayer version where the AI plays both hands (an async match, only one person needs to be online), loads more cards, loads more powers and a better UI. We have Facebook integration, so players have a choice between FB logins or our authentication. Facebook players are able to put their art into their photo albums (and thereby advertise their arts for sale to their friends, for fun and profit).
We have a forum as well, so hopefully it will be easier for the alpha players to communicate their feedback (although you can email me directly of course).
Technologically we have made huge strides. Before, the latency for taking a turn was 8 seconds and about 30 DB operations. Previously, during light testing we were filling our daily free allowance of Google App Engine credit in no time. Now taking a turn is 300ms, involves no database writes (the game is all in memcache), and we have not since made a dent in our daily free quota. For those interested in the technical side of things, I can’t recommend the GAE mini profiler developed by the Khan Academy team enough. It tells you down to the stacktrace where each blocking operation occurs and for how long, even on a deployed site, through a JS overlay on your site.
Anyway enjoy the game! And buy LordTom’s Healing Light :p
Workshop: Candle Making Basics
Creation from the last Candle Making workshop
Following on from the previous Candle Making workshop, we are happy to announce the workshop will be running again. Covering the basics of candle making participants should leave with enough knowledge to try some candle-making of their own. No previous experience is required just come along and have fun.
Areas covered will include:
- Different types of candle and wax
- How to safely melt and pour wax.
- Basic candle making techniques.
- Re-using wax successfully.
Location: Edinburgh Hacklab, Summerhall [Getting There]
Date: Saturday 23rd March 2013
Time: 10:30am until about 2:30pm (quite a bit of this time will be spent waiting for wax to cool)
Cost: Hacklab members – £2, Non-Members – £5. Including materials, tea and coffee.
Registration: Email peter@greenhac.org.uk if you would like to attend, or have any questions.
Mark I Mug Plotter
Someone at work broke my favourite mug. Well, the freebie mug I was using. Clearly I needed a new one, and the only logical solution was to build a machine to draw the image of my choice onto a blank mug.
Evil Mad Scientist sell an egg bot kit – it draws a design onto an egg (or other broadly spherical object) using a couple of stepper motors, controlled through an Inkscape plugin. The control board is available separately (the whole project is open source), and is a fairly neat 2-stepper and single-servo controller, connecting to the host PC as a serial port over a USB cable. Hence most of the electronics and software were already taken care of, and I could concentrate on the hardware.
The partially assembled machine
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Hacklab status: Closed :(
