Category: Stuff

Stuff. Just stuff. Anything goes.

The More Official Launch of Everything, and What’s on the Horizon This Year

chorl

It is with the greatest feeling of exhaltation and fear for the future of robotkind that I officially announce the opening of Big Chuck’s Robot Warehouse Adafruit Heavy Industries Co. Ltd. e0designs. Hell, I even went as far as to get stickers.

I’m still flabbergasticulated at how much better everything looks with a generic Avery shippping label attached to it. Get your RageBridge today! Some other potentially exciting products are coming, of course, and these will only get better as more real world usage data returns to me.

With business-business taken care of for now, I’m going to return to ruminating a bit about what *I* want to do now. This year’s already gotten off to a great start, what with infinity sweet-ass machined parts and assembled PCBs and Motorama and junk.

the robot end of things

Clocker’s performance at Motorama was hampered by some typical “teething” issues with not thoroughly tested first-event bots. So, my short term goal is to just get it running reliably. Besides switching first to #25H (heavy) chain, which has by my measurements 33% thicker side plates than the regular 25, I’m also planning on modifying how the legs attach to the frame. The legs just used the threads on shoulder screws to hold the pressure of about 9″ or so of leverage, and those stripped out at the event after a few runs into walls.

Check out those bent shoulder screws with chunks of 1/4″-20 screw thread in them.

Short of finding a way to double support that area, I’m thinking of just massively single-supporting it, making a spacer with a bore of 1/2″ or so and tightening a long screw most of the way through the standoff. Putting that whole region into compression means the leg has to transmit much more force before causing plastic deformation or breakage of the metal. The primary reason behind this is that double supporting was not really feasible without making the fork even narrower due to the positioning of the screw heads, which is something I didn’t want to do.

I’m willing to give one more event to see how the single support performs; if needed, then things will get narrower to fit.

Besides the leg attachment and chain, I intend on rebuilding the clamp actuator. Right now, with a 1/2″-10TPI ACME leadscrew as the primary linear motion element, it suffers a little from nut-and-bolt syndrome where if the clamp runs against a limit, it likes to tighten so much it can’t get loose again!

Clearly suboptimal. What I’m thinking of doing is switching to a fast-travel, high helix angle leadscrew. This would mean I’d have to gear the actuator motor more again, but the output will travel many pitches for one rotation of the screw (or nut). The higher helix angle makes bolting yourself far less likely.

To this end, I bought some 5-start 1/2″ fast-travel leadscrews on McMaster. They go a full 1/2″ per turn!

This is some premium shit – the nut costs $30 and the screw $40. The screw is a higher grade of steel (4140) though, and it’s heat treated, so overall this whole thing will be way more rigid than the current screw.

These changes are all slated to occur Whenever – Clocker will hopefully have monthly jousts and sparring sessions to keep me in practice, so I’m looking to complete these mods in the next 2 or 3 weeks. I’m going to have to pick a new geared motor for the clamp actuator (not in the mood to chop another drill gearbox given their recent quality declination) and also move away from the extremely shady chain drive that is part of the current actuator. Maybe to less-shady chain, but in the best case I’d want to go back to a gear drive.

other bots

I’m kind of itching for another bot again, but it has to not be substantial enough to take attention away from Clocker. Through much discussion at Motorama, I’m going to create a pilot or prototype for something that we want to field later this year (such as at Dragon*Con) or next year at Moto ’14.

That’s it. You’ll have to wait and see.

The Curious Design Space Intersection Between Engineering and Cute Anime Girls

chorl

As a brief aside from my ongoing efforts to transform my new “storefront” website e0designs.com, which apparently 1700 of you have already seen in a state of abject disorganization with phrases like “polka dotted bacon strips” interspersed between stock grainy photos of robot parts, I’d like to draw your attention to a particularly niche interest of mine which I hope to draw more into the spotlight through 2013 as one of my ill-thought-out New Years resolutions (one of which was making that website, and 90% of which have already been shamelessly abandoned).

First of all, a design space is a somewhat wishy-washy word for the set of all independent variables, and hence all theoretically possible variations, of a certain design. We can say for example that the design space of all wheels encompasses variables like diameter, tread pattern, tread material, core material, bearing type, bore size, width, and potentially many more. A design space for Uberclocker’s fork might be all the possible lengths of forks, angles of departure from the ground,  and placement of the center axle that meet the goal of not making the robot lurch forward upon lifting an opponent, which we would have to define specifically as a test case. Design spaces are usually associated with goals or cost functions, and design space analysis is aimed at meeting the desired criterion of the design through systematic breakdown of requirements and approaches.

What the hell does that have to do with anything? Nothing. I’m just saying that the design space intersection between engineering projects and anime girls is too small. The total space of all that can be designed and built, and the total space of all that is representable as adorabu and Japanese, needs to be expanded.

Which is why I would like to present the work of Cynthia Lu now, as a testament to her powerful integrative design approach towards expanding the space of solutions for making engineering kawaii. Cynthia is the mastermind behind Arduino-chan:

What. I know, right?! She also has a tumblr which contains other gems like Team XBee. I foresee much fanfiction potential between Arduino-chan and her XBee friends, seeing as how often real XBee modules are used in conjunction with Arduinos. She’s also working on her visual art and graphics design career in other ways.

(For more information on the extremely Japanese practice of moe-anthropomorphism, see this TVTropes article, because I’ve abandoned Wikipedia completely for such things, though their article is also quite comprehensive.)

Anyways, I have nothing else particular to say on the matter. Stay tuned for an update on Chibikart running with Hall sensors, as well as an Überclocker update!