The Cart The cart will be used to move the claw around the XY table. The cart will also have a spindle on it to raise and lower the claw. The spindle is powered by a drill motor. I still have to figure out a way to run the power and data wires to the [...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D28KmiJrMu4
The Giant claw game can be broken down in to a few parts. The Claw, The Joystick, The Gantry/Cube, The XY table, The Cart, Control system The Claw The claw is working and it is in pretty good shape. The claw can open and closes and pick up toys. It uses a small gear motor [...]
Over the week I worked on the Relay H Bridge, software and circuit diagrams for this project. Only 1 more week till it needs to be done. Relay H Bridge After finding out that my L298 H Bridge was not powerful enough to operate my gantry motors last week, I switched over to use a Relay H Bridge. The advantages of using a relay [...]
Only two weeks left to get the Claw up and running ready for Breaker Faire the Maker Faire fund raiser party. I am starting to get worried that I might not get it done in time. I have been having lots of problems this week with getting the motors working with the gantry system. The motors are [...]
This week I have working on the gantry system. The gantry system is used to move the claw around inside the Cube. I was originally planing on attaching the claw to 4 cables running to pulleys in each of the corners of the cube. The cables would be attached to four electric motors. Just like the sky cam that you can [...]
I started working on the third version of the claw this week. In this version I have added a motor, extended the length of the prongs, and started on the electronics. At first I tried using a direct drive electric motor that I found at VHS. I constructed my own shaft coupler out of sheet metal and hotglue. It [...]
This is the second prototype of the claw. I really liked the claw design by Marc Cryan that I found on Instructables.com but I wanted it to have three prongs instead of two. I did this prototype out of cardboard using trial and error to get the right size for each part. I tried doing the math [...]
I have made a bunch of time lapse videos in the past with my Cannon S90 using the CHDK hacked firmware. These videos turn out great and I have very happy with the results. The problem is that I have to leave my expensive camera unattended for hours or days at a time and I am unable to use the camera while it [...]
Now that I got my controller working and the stepper motors moving with a RAMPs board, I decided to get started on The Claw. I knew that I would have to go thought a bunch of iterations of the claw before getting one that I liked so I wanted to start early. I knew I wanted a [...]
Continuing from my last post on The Giant Claw Game! This week I build the controller for the Giant Claw using the laser cutter, a arcade joystick and a button. The box was cut with VHS’s laser cutter, using a pattern that I created with this laser cutting box making tool. I purchased the joystick and button from a local arcade suppler John’s [...]
This year for the Vancouver Maker Faire I am planning on making a giant Claw Crane game. Normally claw games are found in video arcades and shopping malls and are a glass box where players can control a crane with a joystick and attempt to pick up prizes from the playing area. They are also known as teddy picker, candy crane, [...]
One of my good friends just had a child and I wanted to get them a hand made gift. I decided on making a mobile with VHS’s laser cutter. The first version I designed while at VHS one night. I changed a few things in Version two. I added more rings, designed in holes [...]
The Raspberry PI is good for a lot of things from computer clusters to home automation but its missing a few things such as a real time clock, terminal/barrel power connector, or Analog pins. The Arduino has analog pins that can be read by the USB virtual serial port from the Raspberry PI. In MagPI issue 7, has a great article on [...]
This week I have been playing with the Rapberry PI, Python and the Python GPIO pins library. Software I started by formatting a SD Card with the Raspbian “wheezy” (2012-12-16) image from Raspberry PI’s website. I followed this tutorial on how to set up the Raspberry PI for the first time. I then enabled SSH so I don’t have to attache a monitor, keyboard [...]
About a year ago I found the The Noun Project while looking for some icons for a project and was instantly hooked. They provide a website where you can enter in any “Noun” and get a iconic image. The Noun Project is building a global visual language that everyone can understand. Visually communicating with symbols is incredibly powerful. It’s no [...]
A few of my recent laser cutter projects, have required that I cut some text out of the material. When you cut in to the material using normal font like Arial or Helvetica, the center parts of letters such as “O” and “P” fallout and looks horrible. The inner parts of the font is called “counters“. In typography, [...]
A few days ago I attended a talk at the Vancouver HackSpace (VHS) on using Open Data and lasers to make interesting wooden maps. The talk revolved around TileMill studio and how to style maps using a CSS variant then you could export them as SVG files (vector image). Once the image has been saved as a SVG file it can be [...]
Made with marginallyclever.com for the Reddit Gifts exchange Source image Gcode for the drawbot
My father loves skulls and every year I get him a skull for Christmas. A few years ago I got him a bottle of Crystal Head Vodka. The vodka was concieved by actor Dan Aykroyd and artist John Alexander with an excellent video ad. The crystal skulls are a number of human skull hardstone carvings made of clear or milky quartz, known [...]