Turning junk into 'robots' at Wicksteed Park

I recently ran a talk and workshop on Junkbots at Wicksteed Park's Science Cafe as part of British Science Week. 

The slides below contain the talk.

Junkbots 2017 from Scott Turner

The Science Café was established at Wicksteed Park, as the Park's creator Charles Wicksteed was an inventor and a successful engineer, giving visitors the opportunity to engage in science activities over coffee and cake in an informal and fun environment.

News articles about this workshop:

http://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/learn-about-charles-wicksteed-s-legacy-during-british-science-week-events-at-kettering-park-1-7864098

http://www.connectfm.com/2017/03/10/87414/

Find out more at the British Science Week website

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Build yourself a Crumble Junkbot

Over the last eight years I have been working (off and on) on a project, junkbots (http://junkbots.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/introduction.html), in which 'junk' is used to embed environmental, engineering and computing concepts. One part that has grown from this project is using drinks cans, motor, batteries and something to unbalance the motor to produce a vibrating 'bot' that move along a smooth surface. 

To add a little more control both Raspberry Pis (http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/raspberry-pi-controlled-robot-from-junk.html) and Micro:bits (http://robotsandphysicalcomputing.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/do-it-yourself-remote-controlled.html) have been investigated.


In this post a Crumble controller from Redfern Electronics is used. The crumble controller is an excellent board for this project, it is relatively cheap, it is programmable with it's own graphical language, and it has motor drivers built in. In the figure to the left the parts (apart from adhesive tape) used can be seen.

1. Building the body.
Tape three pens (with their lids on) on to the drinks can - making a tripod arrangement. Add (tape it on usually) a motor with something on the axle to unbalanced the motor; I use broken toy propellors but mis-shapen blu-tak; clothes pegs could be used.

2. Wiring up
Using croc-clips ideally, but loops of wire if not, connect the battery to the controller and also the motors to the controller. Plug in the USB cable into the controller and the computer.

3. Running and Controlling
Make sure the Crumble software (http://redfernelectronics.co.uk/crumble/) is installed on the computer. 

An example is shown below that drives the motor forward and then backward repeatly. You might need to change the percentage values based on experiment, for the motor used. In the video below the junkbot is shown in action.

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Robotis Mini Robot - building

Confession time, love playing with robots, but I am not a big fan of building robots from kits; this one was too much to resist after seeing what https://robotsinschools.com/, with their EdBot, have been doing. 

The EdBot is based around the Robotis Mini robot (I got mine from http://www.robotshop.com/en/robotis-darwin-mini-humanoid-robot.html) is a robot kit with an open source embedded board,  uses the OpenCM9.04-C microcontroller, running on a 32bit ARM Cortex-M3. 

Software is free to download, I am running it on an Android (appropriately) Tablet.

At the moment I am at the calibration/setting up stage and finding I might have made a couple of mistakes in the build. Good fun so far but more to follow in future posts.




All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Robots at the Science Museum 2 (+few other things there)

No text (other than this sentence) but just a collection of photos from a recent visit to the Science Museum, London.

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon

Robots at the Science Museum

The Science Museum has a fantastic Exhibition on Robots running between 8th February till 3rd September 2017 - well worth a look.

Science Museum's video of highlights

Collections of photos from the exhibition.

Automaton

Figure 1

Figures 1 and 2 are of the James Cox and John Joseph Merlin 1773 The Silver Swan usually found at The Bowes Museum .

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 3 is the intricate Automaton Spider (c1604)


A couple of Movie Stars

Figure 4: Replica of 'Maria' Metropolis 1927

Figure 5: Endoskeleton from the Terminator 2: Judgement Bay, 1992

Humanoids

Figure 6: Eric the Robot - http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/plan_your_visit/exhibitions/eric 

The heads

Figure 7: The eyes follow you when you are queuing

Figure 8: Inkha, 2002

Figure 9: First head of Cog, 1999 http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/overview.html

Figure 10: Lucy 2001-2006 by Steve Grand 

Companions

Figure 11: Trumpet Playing Robot, Toyota, 2004

Figure 12: YuMi Collaborative robot, ABB 2015

Figure 13: Baxter Collaborative Robot, ReThink Robots, 2015

Educational Robots

Figure 14: Kaspar, University of Hertfordshire, 2005

Figure 15: Zeno R25, 2013

Figure 16: iCub, Italian Institute of Technology, 2004

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with. Twitter @scottturneruon