Hacklab member Gary Martin has a new shiny gadget: an Ultimaker 2 3D printer. This Thursday from around 19:00 Gary will host an informal workshop to demo some of the software, print some widgets, and bring along his stash of test 3D prints for closer examination (some seen in the photo above). Gary has been Read more about Thursday 20th: 3D printing with the Ultimaker 2[…]
This guide will get you running with the CNC for manual machining operations.
There are three powered units:
1. computer & monitor
2. the electronics and stepper motors (powered by a computer power supply)
3. The CNC cutter, after turning it on at the wall, you also need to set the direction of the cutter, and turn the speed up. It will not turn the cutter until the speed is set to zero and then increased (so it doesn’t start spinning by accident)
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.
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.
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).
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 Read more about Edinburgh Mini Maker Faire[…]
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
A nice Thursday evening was spent in our new Machine / Dirty room creating a very solid workbench for our antique metalworking lathe. We should have taken more photo’s along the way but suffice to say we now have a solid platform to mount the Lathe and bring is back into full working order. Watch Read more about A new home for the Lathe![…]
There are a range of mini-ITX form-factor motherboards these days, usually supplied with a low-power CPU as well as the normal on-board options such as LAN and audio; just add memory, PSU and some form of storage to get a complete, very small PC. Oh, and a case, which is usually where the fun begins. Read more about Laser-cut PC case[…]
Robotics blogger, Per Sjoborg, from flexibilityenvelope, is coming to visit us on Sunday the 20th. He is bringing the coolest pieces of consumer modular technology yet, Modrobotic’s Cubelets. I’ll be down from 2pm onwards if you would like to join us, or do any other kind of robotic hacking. Tom
Edinburgh Hacklab is pleased to announce the arrival of a rather special bit of equipment, a laser cutter. So what does one do with a laser cutter? It enables high resolution (0.0254mm/1000dpi) engraving and/or cutting of a wide range of materials including Acrylic, Crystal, Bamboo, Cloth, Fabric/Denim, Fiberglass, Glass, Laminated Plastic, Leather, Marble, Plastic, Paper, Rubber, Read more about Laser Cutter[…]