Arduinos 101 and Workshop 88

I recently joined as a full member of Workshop 88 which is a local maker-space in the Glen Ellyn, Il. As back story, I originally was thinking about what it would take to start my own maker-space. I tweeted my thoughts and a member of Workshop 88 replied back. In summary, that they did that already, were close to me, and had classes in the things I was looking for. I first went to their lock-picking class maybe a month or so ago which was taught by Toool. I really liked the crowd and the knowledge so I joined. I have been wanting to learn about micro-controllers and Arduinos in particular. My goal is to learn how to use the NXShield-D to program Mindstorms robots. Last night, I attended an introductory Arduino class. Having taken some C and C++, the syntax fell right into place. The instructor, who is also a member, did an amazing job of bringing his students up from the most basic blinking LED type programs to using a temperature sensor to decide what color an LED should be. The application of this was a coaster that would have an LED that would change colors depending on how hot the beverage was on the sensor. Red was for too hot, Green for just right, and blue for too cold. To adequately demonstrate the operation, I changed the limits to 75F and above for hot, and 70F and below for cold. The room was sitting at 72F. Since it was between the extremes, the LED was green. When I put my finger on the temperature sensor, it rose beyond the 75 degree limit and changed the LED color to red. When I placed a chilled water bottle on the sensor, the temperature dropped below 70F and turned on the blue LED. During all of this I had a readout that I made which told me the temperature in F,C, and K. You can download the code I made here. Check out the tutorial for the project here.

The whole setup

Sitting at room temperature.

Applying heat from my finger.

Applying a cold water bottle to the temperature sensor.

Combining a Nitro Motor or High Powered Motors with Mindstorms and a 8070 Super Car

I have always wanted to make a Technic super car. I have gotten close in my own way, but I never fully built anything that truly satisfied me. In my mind, I have always wanted a Lego Super car that could travel at or near highway speeds. As it turns out, ganging Lego motors can only go so far.

A Hobby Aircraft Motor

In contrast, a hobby electric aircraft motor would do very well as the main driving motor to propel the car at warp speed. I want to get one that puts out around a horsepower or more. If I used this solution, It will be controlled by a Mindsensors NXT Relay Driver. Moreover, the NXT will control the NXT Relay Driver which will control another relay for high power use that connects the motor to the battery. This solution would be simple and avoid the need to use a proper motor controller, however, the sudden torque might snap the Lego pieces. It might be necessarily to get a high current motor controller to try to smooth out the sudden onset of torque.

A Nitro Motor

 The other option would be use an actual nitro motor. This is an example of a nitro motor that I would consider. I would totally be cool with this if it doesn't melt anything and I can find one small enough to fit in the car. It looks like the really cheap ones are 50 bucks a pop. I would be totally new to this side of the hobby. This would be mixing the geeky Technic side with the shiny semi custom RC car side. This really should happen sooner rather than later. I would have the NXT control a motor which actuated the throttle. I think the nitro motors like these have a centrifugal clutch which would be perfect for this application. It will let the user slowly apply torque to the drive train without snapping the parts. In addition, it will also let the car idle and not creep. I did design a heavy duty differential in CAD that I am going to 3D print eventually. It uses 4 knob wheel gears since they are the strongest type of gear Lego has. It also has bearings to help everything run smoothly. One day I might have a nitro motor abusing one of my heavy duty custom differentials :)

You might be curious how I am actually going to connect any of this to the Lego system itself. I am getting a 3D printer, and I am going to print the parts I need to get either the electric motor or nitro engine mounted into the car. I also have a small hobby lathe, drill press, and mini CNC mill to help me accomplish this project. Lets hope the propulsion system doesn't melt whatever it touches. If it does, this might end up being the first liquid cooled nitro Lego car.

Lego's 8070 Super Car

The platform that I am thinking about modifying is an 8070 super car. My mom gave it to me for my 23rd birthday. Thanks mom! It has some pretty nifty features that I would like to preserve. It has "lambo doors", a pop open hood, a pop open rear spoiler, steering, and propulsion. It also has one of Lego's moving decorative engines under the hood, but I don't really find that overly amusing. It is going to get replaced by an actual engine of some sort. In the stock setup, all of the functions are actuated by a medium motor mated to a Lego transmission, and moving the stick around in the drivers area changes what function the medium motor actuates. I was studying the directions last night to see how easy it would be to change everything. Lego did a great job integrating everything together which will make this a bit of a pain to modify. The transmission is the centerpiece of the model; it is where the magic happens to make all the functions work. I would remove the transmission, and try to motorize the functions individually so that the NXT can control the functions. It looks like most of the functions operate with a worm-gear type setup which moves a crank and then a set of linkages. It might be possible to replace the crank and linkage setups with some Lego pneumatics. There are some minor features that I want to add too. One thing that super cars ought to have are working headlights, and I will add some remote control functionality with a Mindsensors PSP-Nx-4c. That will give me a slick user interface and lots of buttons to control the other functions of the car.


In summary, this is really going to take the term "super car" to the next level. An actual source of torque such as a hobby aircraft motor or nitro engine paired with the intelligence of an NXT will make  an extremely fast, one of a kind, and programmable machine.

Motorizing a Lego 8081-B Model Hot Rod

I want to get into motorizing some of Lego's Technic cars. One present that I got for my 23 birthday was an 8081 set from Jessica. This set can build two specified models. The A model is a truck. The B model is a hot rod. I decided to build the hot rod because I can't bear the thought of a just two wheel drive truck. However, a two wheel drive hot rod seems perfectly natural. After building the stock hot rod, I wanted more. I then set out motorizing this model to warm up for combining Mindstorms with an 8070 model supercar that I also got for my birthday. Thanks Mom!

One of the first things that I did was  changing the wheels. I substituted the balloon style tires for the street style tires. I also made the rear wheels larger to give more of a hot rod look. I wanted to maintain the stock functions as much as possible. This meant keeping the working model engine block, dimensions, and body. I pretty much resided myself to taking the driver's area apart to cram in the necessarily parts. I removed the seats, and placed a Power Functions battery box in the driver's area. I wasn't quite able to get the geometry compact enough to get the battery box fully inside the area. This meant that I had to remove the roof.

I then used the existing steering system including the front steering assemblies and the shaft which is used to move the steering by hand. I added a Power Functions medium motor with a worm-gear assembly that uses the white 24 tooth slip gear to actuate the steering. This not only allows for the steering to be precise and controllable, but also lets the motor try overrun the steering boundaries without causing any damage. This is important because kids do not seem to observe common sense with playing with other people's stuff.

While I was at it, I also put the Power Functions IR Receiver in the rear of the model. It fits quite nicely back there and helps the steering motor stay snug against the frame. I had to do a little bit of mechanical acrobatics to actually connect the receiver to the vehicle because the Technic holes ended up being spaced half off.

Given that I want to preserve the engine block reciprocation, I had to also preserve the shaft that connected the crankshaft to the wheels. Other than redesigning huge chunks of the model, preserving the shaft was the only real option. I searched for ways to finagle motors in at right angles, but nothing was quite fitting as well as I really wanted. Finally, I saw the KISS solution which was mounting another medium motor directly to the back of the frame which held the differential. It was much easier than doing any other solution and also preserved the frame and body. I am pretty happy with how this turned out:

Overall View

Right Side View

Left Side View

Underside View

Three Motor Sumo Robot

An LDD Screenshot of the robot

This is a video from a Mindstorms class that I taught at InZone

This is a video from a Mindstorms class that I taught at InZone

I wanted to share my sumo robot with you. My sumo robot is pretty cool. In the scheme of things, there are better sumo robots, however, mine has proven to be decent and fun to work with. One of the things that makes my robot special is that it uses all three of the NXT motors for movement. This is accomplished with the third motor powering a differential which aides the other two motors. The other two motors each power a wheel directly. I have a Lego Digital Designer file so you can see it and build your own. The nifty part are the geometries that I used to make the three motor core solid. With lithium batteries, mine weighs in at 2.16 pounds which is right below the 2.2 maximum. You can get all the files for the robot here. The files include the Mindsensors firmware, NXT-G program, additional software blocks, and a Lego Digital Designer file. If I were to build another robot, I would change the pusher design so that there was a angled edge running on the ground. The Lego Technic beams have rounded edges which do not really make a good wedge to get under an opponent.

I programmed it in NXT-G. The program is a finite state machine. There are three parts of the program running at the same time. One part gets the values from the sensors, one part checks the state and then executes the state, and the other part is the logic which sets the state. The robot has the following states: forward, backward, turn left, turn right, or stop. Based on the sensor values coming in, the state is set and then executed. I am using the Mindsensors firmware which helps to make the operation smoother when compared to the stock firmware. I am also using the "mini blocks" which seem to be a bit better.

There are three programs for this robot. The first one is called JAYSUMOFINAL. It is a full sumo program meant to conform to the rules of official Lego sumo competitions. It has the 5 second countdown after the start and can choose the the initial turn direction. JAYSUMOEXPRESS is similar to the previous program except it does not have a countdown and the user doesn't choose the initial turning direction. The last program is called JAYSUMOPSPNX-4. It  is meant to be use with a Mindsensors PSP-Nx-v4 for remote control. To use this program, one simply unplugs the rear light sensor and plugs in the receiver. The receiver is easily mounted sideways in front of the NXT. This gives the user a slick and responsive interface for remote control operation.

Shapeoko Mill

I have been looking forward to building this Shapeoko Mill for a while now. I want to own my own basic manufacturing equipment so that I can start to build prototypes of my ideas. The Shapeoko is a really good design and it is easy to build upon. Right now, I am working on getting a simple job competed as an example. I also have a Solidoodle 3D printer in the mail right now. I am very pleased with how well it turned out. The designers really went out of their way to make sure that you could build this mill quickly and without additional tools that did not come with the kit. I spent a Friday night and part of a Saturday building my mill. Total build time might have been around 5 to 7 hours. One part of the mill that I thought could use some improvement was the way the rubber gear belts were connected to the frame. The belts are important because the X/Y gantries traverse their working envelope by creeping along the belts. The points where the belts are meant to fasten do not provide as sturdy of a connection that I would like and are out of proper alignment. I changed how the belts were fastened to improve the alignment of the belts and their connection to the frame. Once my 3D printer comes in, I will devise some sort of clever way to fasten the belts to the frame in a more permanent and streamlined fashion.

beginning the plates

some of the tools and connectors

Would you look at that, it is looking like something!

My desk was really awesome.

The mechanicals are complete.

  

Finished the electronics!

Fin

Lego Robotics Sumo Ring

I have been wanting to build a sumo ring for battling hobby robots. Today was the day. I intend on using it to test my own bots as well as a teaching tool and to help out at events at Brickworld. I teach Lego Mindstorms robotics at Harper College through a program called Inzone. The ring is made from a piece of 4ft by 8ft by 1/2in plywood. My dad and I bought it and had it cut in half at Home Depot. Both sides of the plywood were used to form a 4ft by 4ft by 1in thick square. After some geometry to find find centers, we did some jig-sawing to make it a circle. The two rounds are secured to each other by some gorilla glue and 5 screws. The screws come up from the bottom so keep the battle surface free of any imperfections. We did some painting and even made a mask for the white stripe around the outside. If I were to do it again, I  would 3D print a tool with my Solidoodle that would basically be a swing arm that attached to a jigsaw. This would ensure that the radii swept by the saw is exactly constant throughout the duration of the arc. In addition, I would also add a mount to attach a razor blade so that the masking and painting process became faster and more exact. That being said, we put a day into building this thing, and it turned out really well!

Cutting

Sanding

Gluing the two halves together

Black Paint

Masking for White Border

Done!

The Collapse of Advertising

Hitting the Mark

I don't know if you noticed this, but it seems that mass advertising has very little effect anymore. In the advertising world, advertisers work to overcome "the clutter." The clutter is basically the noise generated by other advertisements. We are hitting a saturation point were people are desensitized from visual stimulation. Think about it: does seeing a Coke logo really make you buy Coke? It is not like people don't know what Coke is already. What are they hoping to achieve? Are they trying to reach a new audience? Are they trying to remind you what Coke is? I certainly never forgot...

Online advertising is another medium that is become saturated. I am pretty sure people have learned to tune out the boarders and certain spots on websites. Seriously, who even looks in those spaces anymore? Moreover, what about adblocking and script killing browser extensions? The scary part is that companies pay significant amounts of money to appear online. Myself, I intentionally avoid looking anywhere where I know an advertisement is. If I happen to see an advertisement, I might even intentionally not buy the product.

So if the current version of advertising is broken, what is the next generation of advertising? I think the next generation is going to be word of mouth. Yes, we have come full circle, but it is not just any form of word of mouth: in person word of mouth. Online user reviews are poorly written and generally don't have enough credibility to use reliably. People are turning off from the self appointed faceless opinion leaders on the internet. Opinion leaders are coming back as in person friends and not online authorities because people trust their friends.

Update: Slashdot has a great set of articles related to the decline of advertising. It seems that I am not the only one who noticed!