Can I get a quick show of hands from any members interested in doing a quadcopter build if I do a class?
Brooks Coleman Lil’ Deuce
The Lil’ Deuce frame I got from Dalton is really turning out to be a lot of fun and you can build one out for under $100. You can get a cheap, compatible 6-channel radio for about about $50 and same for the goggles so total cost would be $200 if you need everything.
You can get extra receivers for the radios for around $10 to $20 that can also work for controlling robots. Also, extra cameras with transmitters around $20 for the video if you want to telepresence (the kids call it FPV for First Person View) your bot.
These things are a blast to fly around indoors and you can set the video transmitters to the minimum 25mw so you don’t need the HAM license required for the higher power levels. Eventually I’d like to offer HAM test training classes too. So … anyone?
Here’s a couple of videos I did with the Lil’ Deuce, and don’t worry, it’s on horizon mode so no dizzying dives or loops. Also check out my latest addition to the effort of blending moving features to the indoor course.
[Posted on behalf of Yama Ploskonka by rutrohverlord]
This device, designed and built by Robot Group member, Yama Ploskonka, appeared in a cruder form at Maker Faire Austin on May 04, 2019.
The Yamautomaton, a computer-controlled machine originally designed for research in kinesthetics of calligraphy, actually delivers a pretty good hand! Here making a copy of the Canticle of the Creatures, a praise prayer by St.Francis, imitating the hand (font or typeface to y’all) of the oldest manuscript in Italian, c. AD 1270. The machine was built in Austin, Texas, from parts of a homespun CNC originally from 2018. Completing these two sheets of fine calligraphy would take a practiced professional a good couple days. That’s too much work. To save effort, I only spent 6 months building the machine, developing the software, even figuring the right ink-gum-pigments mix. Saving work and time, that’s my motto!
Yama reports that, after just a few months of additional work, the device has now reached ‘production’ reliability.
“I just drop a file with tagged text, and the machine does the rest (of course I have to mother the pen’s ink supply, and set the paper, but that would be the same if doing calligraphy by hand).”
He continues, “I seem to find very few ‘practical’ writing automata out there, seems the concept is a bit abandoned. Yes, of course, essentially it’s just a CNC, conceptually not that much beyond an EggBot, and, yes, it would take just a few rods to transfer the movement to a more humanoid arm and hand. It might be that the actual challenge is then really in the software.”
“The text file goes in as text, including dimensions for the paper, column locations, then coordinates for each stroke in each character come as a CSV spreadsheet. Both get slurped by some Python code (150 lines), that spits out Gcode (for red, gold, black), and on to the CNC.”
Future developments include another attempt at Chinese writing.
“It proved too complicated, so I did a ‘step back to better jump’ by going first to Blackletter (Fraktur, like Gutenberg font), then to this medieval hand. That did help me figure out and pass several limitations that my software and conceptualization had, so I feel more ready now for what is probably still the most complex writing system in use, Chinese. As a fringe benefit, the code is more able to be ‘universal’ … potentially being able to deliver any hand that has been compiled.”
The Yamautomaton (likely a tentative name) is able to travel. If y’all have a venue, please speak up.
