Monthly Archives: November 2015

designing a robot foot from a coathanger

I always love to obey to minimalism and I always love to construct stuff with a minimal amount of material and complexity. Of course, the question is then how replicable, durable and maintainable the result is.

In the present case it became obvious, that at some point in time, Trashbot would need to have an additional degree of freedom on his foot, namely an ankle that allows him to lean forward. The present prototype is acutally from August last year. But now I’m revisiting my designs as Trashbot recently got the long awaited additional hip servos and the logical next step is to add the ankle servos.

So let’s start with the layout:

t-shaped servor layout Continue reading

Trashbot 5, new hips, first movements

Last week I added three degrees more to Trashbot, two hip servos for forward movement (“kicking”) and one to the bone.

This week I found some time to do the first single servo movements and tests to check out the new geometry of the bot since the broader hips will affect the Center of Gravity etc. Here’s the first attempt to do what the normal gait would do: shift the body to one foot:

So, definetly software teaching me how to improve hardware… Next draft iteration: Continue reading

Working on more Degrees of Freedom in the legs of Trashbot

I’ve been working on Trashbot for quite a while now, but the basic gait mechanism is still the same as in version one. The hips’ movements and the distance between the legs define the possible step length. This is annoying since the robot is rather tall and you’d expect that he’ll walk a bit faster than he actually does. However, moving faster induces stronger vibrations in the skeleton and makes him fall much easier.

trashbot 4 in full length

Also, the upper part of the body will tilt “stronger” when Continue reading

Blackbird 2, 3D FPV camera and the Oculus Rift DK2, pt. 1

Slowly inching towards the Blackbird2 on the Oculus Rift DK2.

Right now, I have the ancient Logilink video capture card running on Windows 10 and found a software that is old enough to be compatible with it but young enough to run on Windows 10.

It installed the DirectPlay on Windows10, so that’s the tribute to old tech, I guess.

So I get the video on my desktop now, have updated the Nvidia driver 358.87 for my GTX980 and the lastest Oculus Rift driver (v8.0).

What we get is here:

blackbird video on PC

As you can see, it’s black and white somehow. The capture says it sees 525 (PAL60) or 625 (PAL_N), with the latter setting, I also get some sort of colors but they change rapidly and are mostly false…

I can also put the video on full screen, but it seems that with the latest drivers for the Oculus, I can’t use the DK2 as second output display, so I don’t know how to put the camera video into the DK2. Clearly, more research needed…