I picked up a film camera a few years back from a vendor at the MIT SwapFest, a collection of very colorful folks in beat up minivans selling all sorts of things out of a parking garage in Kendall Square. It was a Kodak 1A from the late 1920s - pretty, but also pretty common, … Continue reading A 115 Year Glow-Up
I swear I don't just work on lights these days... I've been building and improving a little corner here at Formlabs for Electronics rework over the past year or so, and I've been pretty happy with it - except for the lights. Soldering reworks onto fine-pitched components and installing 0402-sized components takes both good dexterity … Continue reading Another Bright Idea
April was a tricky month. Formlabs is bustling; we announced a big new product to the world and now the days are spent on the final tweaks to get it into our customer's hands. And what is my role in all of this? I am, well, focused on growing some vegetables in our still-too-short New … Continue reading Brightening my DayLilies
...well, how was that for a cliffhanger? It wasn't exactly a riveting story, I agree. It's been a year and a half, plus or minus, since I left my story hanging here. I had to ask out of curiosity - Google tells me that I haven't posted or given any sort of update in exactly … Continue reading Hello, Again
In a way, this post is part of the TigerBug project, which was a robot hardware platform I worked on for use at RIT for research and as a fundraising tool . However, it will probably not be going under that name anymore, as I want to take the project in a different direction. Take a look at the project hub for past progress on different components of this project.
I displayed the robot at ImagineRIT this weekend, showing it making some basic shapes and text. I used the Jtech Photonics plugin for Inkscape to generate some Gcode for it, with a few modifications to make it work with a pen (the software is designed for use with laser cutters). Marlin, the open-source firmware I'm … Continue reading It’s Alive!
I'm working on N.C Sketcher for my final robotics class at RIT. See other posts about this system on the project hub. While I have been sinking some time into exploring computer vision processes, I have also been working hard on coming up with an actual hardware platform. While benchmarking existing drawing machines, I made … Continue reading Introducing N.C. Sketcher
I've been starting to explore different methods for figuring out the location of drawing surfaces for my yet-to-be-named Drawing Robot. I have a few options available to me for use, which mainly include OpenCV, for both C++ and Python, and the imaging processing tools within MATlab. There are a few differences between these methods, and I've … Continue reading Detecting Edges of Objects using OpenCV
Drawing machines are a decent project to build from scratch, but they are not complex robots by today's standards. They use open loop motors, and the kinematic model is relatively simple and well-understood. Open-source firmware like Marlin can be used to control the robot like a 3D printer using G and M commands, and is easily … Continue reading Drawing Machine, with a Brain
I've been spending most of my free time these past few days researching existing concepts for drawing robots, exploring different unique methods, and narrowing down the scope of my project to something that could actually be realized. I've found quite a few different ideas floating around out there, some with obvious design issues, but many … Continue reading Sketch Robot: Eyeing the Competition
