PWM Fan Controller

Used Adafruit’s M0 feather proto board and their OLED feather wing to build a quick PWM fan contoller.  The M0 version was needed for the faster CPU to be able to drive the required PWM frequencies.  To be fair you can probably find a cheaper solution already built on the internet, but where’s the fun…read more

Hawk DIY Chassis v0.5

This project is do-it-yourself 3D printable chassis.  It is built around standard 2020 frame construction used in DIY 3D printers and CNCs.  The design files are available online at Thingaverse, thing:4297391.   Note, this is a derivative work, the 2020 beams are based on other designs.  The new parts were the brackets and panels.  Where possible…read more

Digital Scoreboard, Revisited

After almost a year sitting on the bench, we did some more work on the digital scoreboard.  After some paint, a bit of mechanical hacks and software bug fixes we have a working scoreboard.  It can be controlled from smartphone or even smartwatch using BluetoothLE.  It runs off 4 D-cell batteries, DC adapter or USB…read more

Water Meter 1.1

There was an Arduino Yun sitting around that needed a home so we adapted our water meter to this powerful little network board.  It’s unfortunatel that the Yun is discontinued as it’s really a good fit for this type of project.  It can be powered from ethernet, PoE.  And being able to get to the…read more

Cubic Revisited

WORK IN PROGRESS Cubic is a robot project that is making slow progress.  It’s been an experiment putting some different projects together.  It has two robot arms built with a mix of Dynamixel AX-12A and XL-320 servos and controlled with a OpenCM board.  The base is a Sainsmart robot tracks kit.  The motors are currently…read more

Pocket PiGRRL

We made one of the Adafruit’s Pocket PiGRRL kits.  It’s a really rewarding project, however it does involve a significant  amount of soldering.  When done you are treated to having an awesome handheld game platform. For more information see Adafruit’s website. Pocket PiGRRL (https://learn.adafruit.com/pocket-pigrrl/overview)  

AIY Vision Kit

Had a good unboxing experience with Google’s AIY Vision Kit. https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/ The project uses a board with the Movius artificial intelligence coprocessor connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The camera images are processor using their TensorFlow framework to recognize the emotions on faces. Very simple kit to get going with a lot of amazing…read more

Wall-E Display

Used Adafruit’s Feather TFT to create a replica WALL-E display module.  

Labnation’s Smartscope

Doing some I2C debug on an Arduino and OpenCM9.04c boards. Loving Labnation’s smartscope that plugs into a PC/tablet https://www.lab-nation.com/  

Digital Scoreboard

This is a prototype of a digital scoreboard. It’s uses several 8×5 NeoPixel matrixes from Adafruit.  The Arduino Uno is used to provide a game time and scores which is controlled by phone via Bluetooth.  It’s definitely an early version which needs polish and cost reduction, but good for the backyard basketball hoop.    

Poppy Ergo Jr with Wii Nunchuck Control

Using the work from profmason.com  and an Gikfun I2C Wii adapter purchased on Amazon, we hooked up a Wii nunchuck controller to the OpenCM controller our robot arm.  It was surprisingly easy. We programmed the OpenCM controller to use the two buttons on the back to cycle through the different servos, the LEDs switch to show…read more

AX-12A Robotic Arm

We’re building a robotic arm based off a project on thingiverse.  We don’t have the Dynamixel AX-12A servos right now, so we printed some dummies to test out the assembly. 3D printed frame parts 6  Dynamixel AX-12A cables ArbotiX-M controller board CM-700 and compatible battery OpenCM9.04c compatible battery and power adapter 35x52mm bearing and washer…read more

Darwin Mini

Robotics Darwin Mini kit available on Robotics website  

Lamp

Lampshade based on open source Poppy Ergo Jr 6x Dynamixel XL320 3D printed brackets OLLO rivets dynamixel USB adapter dynamixel power adapter dynamixel cables power supply  

Printable Humanoid

Thingiverse had plans for a humanoid robot 3D printed parts 18x Dynamixel AX-12A Dynamixel cables lots of screws CM-500 from Robotis feet  from Robotis chest from Robotis The way we got interested in the humanoid robot is by looking at the humanoid robot soccer game, and surprisingly it was not used by a remote it was…read more

Zumo

The dream was to build Johnny #5 from the movie short circuit to go trick-or-treating with us.  However we’ll be happy with a smaller version.  First step was to find a wheeled base.  We looked a snowblower tracks but they were pretty big and expensive.  We found a fun little robot from Pololu that showed…read more

2WD

The 4WD was kind of hard to turn since all four wheels had to work right.  The 2-wheel drive model was much easier to get to turn.   We used a scanning sensor on a servo to did sweeps to look for obstacles.  In comparison though the three sensors on the 4WD project did a…read more

4WD

This was our first home project making a robot.  We started this in March before we had a blog.  The concept was to create a wheeled device that could drive itself around the house similar to our Roomba. At first we used a webpage to control the direction. The we added sensors to detect the…read more