The RepRap Project – An open source 3D-printer for less then 500€

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Everybody who has ever designed and built a robot by him self knows about the difficulty by building special components like sensor holders, adapters or axes bearings . Either you have to pay a huge amount of money to a company that is willing to build small product series on it or , which is more common you build them by your self and spend a lot of time on prototyping and manufacturing tasks, and then build it by hand. For the last option the  usage of a 3D-printers can speedup the process.

Generally spoken is a 3D-Printer an industrial robot with several degree of freedoms, that is moving an extruder and injects either plastic or metal in a way that a plastic or metal object (the prototypes)  are created. This technology allows therefore to print physical objects. By using this technology, the coast of one object/prototype are dramatically shrinking. More or leas the coast of one object is given by the material coasts and the time which is needed to build a CAD-Design of the object.

The major drawback of 3D-Print is the acquisition costs. Professional printer can easily coast more then 20.000€. But there is hope. The open source project RepRap allows us to build our own 3D-Printer by coast round about 500€. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid-prototyper and is a hardware open source project. Like the big industrial machines does this project support a easy way do build your first prototypes.

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Mendel’s improvements over Darwin from Rep Rap on Vimeo.
Of course there is also darkness. The RepRap-hardware is currently on the state of the industrial machines from 5 years ago. For example does the open source version not support to printing two type of material simultaneously. But this is extremely usefully if you have to build object with huge holes, which would collapse if there is no filling material inside that will be removed later.

But still this technollogy makes prototyping that easy and quick that it is worth to give it a try.

Updated:

The „Elektrischer-Reporter“ (German) has a reportage of the background and the ideas for the close future on 3D-Printing and homemade products. The basic stadement is an upcoming change of production lines. Every customers will be also a small factory and an upcoming market of „digital construction plans“ will showup.

Open source is FAIR – IAIS released the „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ as open source

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Developing and programming robotic systems can sometimes be an unsatisfying task. This feeling is mostly not related to problems that occur during „high level“ problem solving. It is mostly appearing if you try to get the system it self up and running. So tools and solutions are needed to help us to overcome these initialization barriers.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems or for short Fraunhofer IAIS, does now offer a special computer library that can support the developer to get a width field of sensors and actors up and running. In addition it includes a various number of algorithmic for every day robotic problems like Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) or image processing. The so called „Fraunhofer Autonomous Intelligent Robotics Devices Library“ or for short FAIR library, is a C/C++ development library which is actively used in the VolksBot® projects and is released as open source project under the GNU-license Creative Commons.

FAIRlib is soon available at the sourceforge project „OpenVolksBot„.

Updated: The initail version is now available (see also here) and is published under the CC-by-sa-nc.

Talk on High speed manipulation from Carson Reynolds

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Manipulation is the field of manipulating physical objects by end effectors which are usually attached to a robotic arms. The most end effectors are special tools which are designed to perform special task during a manufacture process (e.g. painting pistols, electro welds or holders). Some more general and extremely fast end effectors are pressented in the following video. It contains a talk given by the assistant professor Carson Reynolds from the Ishikawa Komuro Laboratory in Tokyo. His team is using extreme fast end effectors and arms, and did combining them with high speed vision systems. The outcome is quiet impressive. Their robot hand can grasp a grain of rice with a tweezer or dynamically catch a flying mobile phone.

In addition to the video has the blog  Robotspodcast talked to Mr. Reynolds, which can be found as podcast  here (MP3).

Labview Educational Edition

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NI LabVIEW Education Edition software helps high school teachers bring science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) concepts to life through hands-on learning. With LabVIEW, you can quickly build a program to log data, power a robot, or analyze information. The new LabVIEW Education Edition was designed in conjunction with Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach to meet the needs of engineering educators, and works seamlessly with LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, Vernier SensorDAQ and Go! Sensors, and TETRIX™ by Pitsco.

(taken from http://www.ni.com/academic/education_edition/)

check out the German press release

Dennis W. Hong presents RoMeLa

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RoMeLa, the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech is currently working on „Robot Evolution Through Intelligent Design“. This means they are taking evolutionary inspired designs and try to adopted them to robotic purpose. Dennis W. Hong, PhD and his students have been creating a lot of really interesting new robots, for example three legged robots, snake like robots or humanoids (e.g. DARwIn). The talk from the TEDxNASA conference, Mr. Hong offers a short overview of their research.

By the way, if you’re wondering about that motto and how „evolution“ can meet „intelligent design“ here comes the answer. Hong tells us:

„Though it has both evolution and intelligent design in the sentence, it has nothing to do with either – „we“ push the boundaries and come up with the next generation robotics (robot evolution) through us doing rigorous research and designing them intelligently (intelligent design). I think it is a clever tag line for our lab.“

Introduction to I2C

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I2C is one of the most used electronically data bus that is extremely often used in embedded systems. It is used for attaching sensors, actuators of other subsystems into the system.

Recently i have found a good introduction which includes background knowledge and a HowToUs on www.uchobby.com.