Skip to main content

Eggbot 2- the drawing crumble junkbot.

figure 1

An earlier post   https://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.com/2021/04/junkbots-2-eggbot2.html discussed the start of the development of a two motored Crumble (from Redfern Electronics) based 'junk-bot'; based around controlling vibrating motors  (https://amzn.to/3mtxEy9) to move the bot.


This post focuses on addressing some of the issues raised in the earlier post. The motors are now glued, via a glue gun, onto the plastic egg (figure 2) and four felt-tip pens are also glued on (see figure 1 above) so there is a firm connection to the egg. Setting the pens in the right positions is the trickest part of the process and you are probably best to experiment with tape / sticky tack before finally gluing them in place.

figure 2

figure 3


I like the Crumble for this task because it is designed to control two motors using a simple graphical programming language, without any extra hardware.

figure 4



The program shown in figure 4 is trying out a lot of the possible combinations of direction for the motors. When the program is run it moves in (and draws squiggly lines) mostly, in arcs. There is still some work to be done on controlling it. It is sensitive to wires being touched, perhaps thinner wires connect the Crumble (figure 3) and the motors? The motors are perhaps not strong enough - though it does move, so perhaps stronger motors, upping the percentage power to the motors or upping the voltage (currently 4.5 to 6v and still within the capacities of the motors)?


It is good fun; there is a lot that can be experimented with,  placement and direction of the motors just being one area.





All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robot Software

In the previous blog posts for this 'series' "It is a good time...."  Post 1  looked at the hardware unpinning some of this positive rise in robots; Post 2  looked at social robots; Post 3  looked at a collection of small robots; Post 4 looked at further examples of small robots Robots, such as the forthcoming Buddy and JIBO, will be based some established open sourceand other technologies. Jibo will be based around various technologies including Electron and JavaScript (for more details see:  http://blog.jibo.com/2015/07/29/jibo-making-development-readily-accessible-to-all-developers/ ). Buddy is expected to be developed around tools for Unity3d, Arduino and OpenCV, and support Python, C++, C#, Java and JavaScript (for more details see http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/customize_your_buddy_companion_robot_with_this_software_development_kit ).  This post contin ues with some of the software being used with the smaller robots.  A number ...

Speech Recognition in Scratch 3 - turning Hello into Bonjour!

The Raspberry Pi Foundation recently released a programming activity Alien Language , with support Dale from Machine Learning for Kids , that is a brilliant use of Scratch 3 - Speech Recognition to control a sprite in an alien language. Do the activity, and it is very much worth doing, and it will make sense! I  would also recommend going to the  machinelearningforkids.co.uk   site anyway it is full of exciting things to do (for example loads of activities  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/#!/worksheets  ) . Scratch 3 has lots of extensions that are accessible through the Extension button in the Scratch 3 editor (see below) which add new fun new blocks to play with. The critical thing for this post is  Machine Learning for Kids  have created a Scratch 3 template with their own extensions for Scratch 3 within it  https://machinelearningforkids.co.uk/scratch3/ . One of which is a Speech to Text extension (see below). You must use this one ...

WebVR 3 Playtime: Augmented Reality

I am going to try to persuade you that using A-Frame it is not hard to do some simple Augmented Reality (AR) for free, via a browser, but that also can run on a mobile device. Introduction This is part of a short series of articles about some experiments with WebVR Web-based Virtual Reality - in this case based on the wonderful A-Frame  ( https://aframe.io )   .  In the first post  WebVR playtime 1: Basics of setting up, images and rotating blocks ,  I looked at setting up a scene and then rotating an object.  In the second pos t, recapped the basics, then look at adding video, 360 degree video, and models developed elsewhere. In this post we are going to start looking at using WebVR as part of an augmented reality solution. I going to start by building on the great resource Creating Augmented Reality with AR.js and A-Frame by Jerome Etienne, creator of AR.js - the starting code below and the basis of the solution ...