FTC State

This Thursday and Friday I traveled with part of the LASA Robotics team to attend the FIRST FTC (First Tech Challenge) state robotics competition. We had built a robot and wanted to compete; although we ended up in the first place alliance (teams of two), the really fun part was seeing how everyone attempted said challenge. In order to win points, you must lift crates containing racquetballs; more points can be had for height.

Photo by Daniel

Some of the robots are pictured above: first is ours, "PHobia" (our team name is Purple Haze, the school color). Second, a scissor lift, third, an articulated arm, and fourth, a forklift-like pulley mechanism.

The scissor lift can obviously get amazingly high for the 18" starting cube boundary. So too can that strange pulley mechanism. The only problem is that they have trouble grabbing crates- they aren't reliable. Therefore, robots 1 and 3 used a gripper. Aforementioned 3rd robot's arm was amazing, but it wasn't very strong. If anything hits it hard enough, it breaks. Therefore, I'm glad to say that our robot was one of the best ones present.

The gripper we built was the only one of its type that we saw. It can pick up a crate, rotate it, and put in a racquetball. The best part, though, was that it could stack. We were able to lift up one crate, put it on another, and lift both- sometimes in less than thirty seconds (that's really good)! Most of all, it was reliable. I suppose that's why we, having beaten the ridiculously high scissor lifts, were on the winning team. It's also a good lesson to take away.

Biomimetics:The Science of Nature Copying

Hi, this is Miles, I am working on this blog in promotion of a magazine I am making in a class I am currently taking. All of my blog posts will hopefully be relevant to anyone wishing to read the magazine, which is about DIY technology and other things that people may find interesting. This is just something I find interesting and i think a lot of other people will too.Inventing is something done mainly humans. This is also true for innovation. At least, that is what our opinion has been for as long as we can remember. Recently In the engineering and science community there has been an ,almost, revolution in thinking about how to engineer. This has come from a realization that we are not the only innovator on this planet. We have realized the we haven't even been making the best or most efficient things. Realizing this, we looked to something far older and far more widespread than us, Nature. This science, for it is a science, is called Bio-mimicry. Engineers and scientists have started looking at what adaptations living things have evolved, and been attempting mimic them. some of the more notable innovations that Bio-mimicry has produced are solar panels modeled like leaves on every level so as to allow for maximum efficiency and found very specific texture from shark skin that just does not let bacteria latch on. One other thing that has been studied is the blue Morpho butterfly.

image obtained from wikipedia

By studying its wing structure on a cellular level we found a structure that gives exceptionally brilliant coloring. Needless to say the advancements that we have obtained from bio-mimetics research has been very beneficial in a wide variety of fields and places. The possibilities that this field opens are numerous and I personally find it to be an extremely interesting field. If you want to learn more you can go to here and read up on it.

3D printing can't be that hard...

I just stood up on Saturday and built a 3D printer. That was fun. Actually, I only built one axis and I still have to order a plastic extruder, but- it worked! See, someone had given me a piece of wood for my birthday, and I had no idea what to do with it. Finally, I decided to build said printer, which I had been thinking about for a while.

Photo by Daniel

I’ve tried before with Lego NXT, but the motors are hard to mount; so I hooked up a stepper motor to a BASIC stamp which I had previously programmed to drive it (the Arduino will come later), and it worked on the first try! Amazing. Anyways, I shall continue building, perhaps with modifications for speed (the leadscrew method that I am using right now is very slow and somewhat jerky), and try to get a first print soon.

Photo by Daniel

This entire project is based off of the RepRap, a project dedicated to making a self-replicating 3D printer. More specifically, it’s a jury-rigged WolfStrap (a RepStrap is a temporary RepRap built in order to make plastic pieces for a RepRap). The original German manufacturing seems a bit better than mine, but I tried. I hope this works; I guess we’ll see.

Problems

Recently I have been trying to hook up a mic to an Arduino, though this is proving to be more complex than other sensors that I have used in the past, such as photo resistors and potentiometers. I have not been getting any output at all when hooking it up through the method I previously used. (Power and input on one side of the sensor, ground on the other side) Thus, I tried hooking it up to an LM386 mic, though I still got no output. I then found an electret mic that was already prepared with an amp for the AUD, GND, and VCC ports. This specific product, however, had some negative reviews. Thus, I am currently in the process of hooking up my current mic to this prepared mic's equivalent diagram.

Credit to idolator.com

Ultimately I want to incorporate this into an entirely different project, a Guy Manuel Daft Punk helmet, though I don't expect to complete this project for quite some time. This project is proving to be quite the hassle, I've been working on it for a few months now and I still haven't finished the master model... The original replica that I'm basing mine off of took over a year.


-Jonas