Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working with the MIT Smart Cities group as an undergraduate lemming. However, in stark contrast with the horror stories of some of my fellow lemmings with positions in other departments and labs, my job freakin’ rawks. So does the whole Media Lab, in fact. It’s right up there on my favorite places on campus list, right next to the Mexican fast food place. I get to do what I do best – think of things and then build them.

Anyway, I’ve been specifically working on the light electric scooter/motorcycle doohickey, something all -3 of you who read my site should recall me talking about some time in early August. The responsibility of the group here is to create a display stand for the most innovative component – the self-contained in-wheel motor-suspension-et-cetera “wheel robot”.

AHH! It’s a wheel floating in midair!

Actually, the mount for the thing is just clear Lexan. Here’s the upper half of the display stand.

The “wheel robot” close up. The motor is a 600W brushed unit that cogs like a beast – indicative of beastly torque. The actual production model, according to the bigwigs, will be brushless. This I like.

The display stand case, painted “flat institute wall white”. LCD flat panels will fit in the rectangular gaps and interface with a PC on the inside to play boring presentations.

Here’s my main contribution. This unit mates some motor controllers, buttons, blinkenlichten, and an Arduino embedded controller to run both the drive motor and the suspension actuator (the coil-over shocks are replaced with small linear actuators to show the multi-link suspension movement). The Arduino takes button inputs and controls a Victor 48HV and Scorpion XL. It’s all smacked onto a piece of scrap Lexan, which somehow fit perfectly in a convenient location and was selected for the job based on this.

It can be seen running the show in one of the above pics.

Anyway, since this will be going to the Milan Motor Show in a few weeks, the next few days will concentrate on testing and generally beating the shit out of it. Because I’m not going to be in Milan, and therefore it cannot break. Ever. Ever, in this case, is defined as “Not until we get it back here”.

The display stand ships… in a few hours, which is why I went in to help out and to finish this off. After this is all done, there will be more exciting things to come.

It’s not just Battlebots any more.

Oh, and if you’re in Kendall Square any time soon, do not stand here.

So today was a Happy Fun Saturday involving waterjets, microcontrollers, and Giant Frickin’ Lasers!

I have a research assistant/task monkey job with the MIT Media Lab, where most of the MITness often read about and documented in media come from. The current project with my group of people is a display and demonstration stand for a “wheel robot”, or self-contained electric motor wheel pod doohickey.

Anyway, while I’m there, I’m also nicking some time on the multiscale fabrication facilities (read: awesome shit to make stuff) to get my own “wheel robot” design done. I tried to cut out the stator winding form today on the waterjet and laser cutter, neither to very much avail, to be detailed.

But first, Ubunt-o-rama!

There was an Ubuntu Linux gathering of sorts put on by the statewide supporters of the OS. All in all it was a great learning experience and productive for many people (they were assisting people with installations and tuning), but it reminded me of one thing that irks me about the “alternative computing” crowd at times.

Some of them try to turn their computing philosophy into something approaching a religion, and think they’re 1337 or holier than the unwashed masses, and are being rebellious or “sticking it to the Man” (i.e. Microsoft) by using Lunix. There was a slew of stereotypical “countercultural” and “nonconformist” activity there – all the typical stuff, like mohawks and body piercings and black trenchcoats. I don’t doubt this was put on for show just for this event, and although it doesn’t bother me in itself, reminded me of that particular pet peeve.

If 99.7% of the things I did on the computer besides the Interwebs didn’t involve either Autodesk Inventor or Solidworks, I’d gladly pop over to a “better” OS. However, because of this simple fact, and also because I very, very rarely have problems with any of the computers to begin with, means that no, I will NOT go to the trouble of sticking to another operating system solely to fulfill your computing ideology. Not even with WINE.

Computers are tools. Some tools are built to do certain things better, and different people find different uses for those tools over others. Good freakin’ robot Jesus., give it a rest.

Anyway, onto the real issues. I didn’t have my real camera with me, so alot of this is with the cell phone camera, which…. sucks.

Here’s the waterjet cutting a stator form out of 1/2″ steel. I wanted to get a feel for how the jet can handle very thin rings of material, since I modeled the form to snugly fit 16 gauge magnet wire.

It wasn’t pretty. I’m sure there are ways of optimizing waterjet cuts that I don’t understand (having only done this twice), but a 1/16″ wall was a bit much to ask for. It was okay near one side, but apparently something got off track and the whole thing blew up.

The laser cutter would have fared better if it could cut outside and inside of lines (which I might be able to work around by selectively increasing and decreasing dimensions on the drawing), but since it zipped right along the cut line, the resulting material was so thin and burnt it just sort of crumbled. What was left was this gear-shaped center piece.

So it looks like a full-support stator form isn’t going to happen unless something changes. The reason I want to investigate a winding core which would keep the magnet wire in place is because… I doubt I can freehand it on a shiny clean turned piece of steel which would really be the best choice.

After calling it quits, I got in with the crew working on the control system for the display stand. The controller board we’re playing with is the Arduino, which seems all the world like a übercharged BASIC Stamp running a C-type language. It has a bootloader already burned on the chip, which is a normal Atmel Flash memory microcontroller.

Having experience with controlling R/C-interface devices like robot motor controllers, I was the first to get something to move. The main goal of this project is to build a human interface which can demonstrate the features of the wheel robot, like the suspension actuation and transmission. And it will light up, which is what matters.

In fact, it was so addicting I burned off 4 hours messing with the thing past jogging the controllers. This is even more reason to whip myself up a chip programmer. The arduino in particular has a bunch of PWM outputs which makes it handy for communicating with off-the-shelf R/C components.

Next: SUNDAY! Hmm, what to do…