(see all parts of "building a home robot")
Since I was a child and saw the tomy omnibot I was fascinated about robot companions. In the following years I took some tries to get or build one – for example the Sony Aibo in 2001 or my Cobra Robot.
Some weeks ago I started my first serious project of a self driving, self charging home robot - including things like face detection and voice output.
My girlfriend was not sure if it would be a little bit scary to live together with a home robot. So I decided to create a first prank design for the robot head especially for her ;-)
(A scary prank design created from old animatronics parts)
The real head will be much more cute and abstract, using a small monitor instead of physical eyeballs.
As the robot “brain” I choose a Raspberry PI 3 because it is small, fast and with low power consumption. Other reasons were: cheap and native camera, hardware connections via the PIO port and the available official touchscreen monitor.
To create most of the body parts I want to use my 3D printer.
In the past I often used 3d editor programs like Autodesk 3D Studio or Cinema 4D – but never real CAD programs. After some research for a low cost but useful CAD program I found OpenSCAD.
This free open source tool and its unusual approach to create objects by writing program code suits perfect to my needs.
Only 3 hours later I had finished my first CAD model of a head prototype and started the 3d printer. (I plan to upload all the STL files to thingiverse.com to share them with other makers who want to built their own home robots)
The first prototype of the robot front head:
The following 4 improved prototypes:
An early prototype showing the complete head shape:
The final front part without raspberry pi...
...and with raspberry pi and the touchscreen monitor:
The next step will be the neck design and the motors for moving the head and the neck.
Continue reading: Part 2 - Neck design and movement
Seven years ago in 2009 I started my first experiences with 3d printing.
It took 2 weeks to assemble my first 3d printer – a rapman from UK. It had no heated built plate and the software needed lot of tuning and testing.
The rapman in 2009:
Then in 2011 I got the makerbot thing-o-matic. It had a heated, automated build platform and only took 2 days to assemble. The software still needed time to tune and to find out the best setting.
All this time I never managed to get PLA printing well – only ABS worked fine for me.
The makerbot in 2011:
Yesterday – 5 years after the makerbot – my ultimaker 3d printer arrived.
In my opinion there are worlds between these two last devices.
The ultimaker looks like from the future with its white led lighted housing, while the makerbot looks like from the past with his wooden case.
The ultimaker prints a lot of finer and more silent than my old makerbot.
No (or only a little bit) software tuning is needed– it is nearly plug and print.
It is very impressive for me to see, how big the improvements of these 5 years are.
Here are some impressions:
During the last weeks I added two useful extensions to my oculus rift.
Attaching the leap motion
The first one is a “must have” for the virtual reality glasses: The leap motion controller.
Attach it to the front of the oculus rift to see your own hand inside the virtual reality.
I already tried to manage this effect using the Kinect some months ago. But the leap motion solution is a much easier to handle.
Attaching a fan
Sometimes - especial in the summer time - the oculus glasses got a little bit fogged.
This can be disturbing when in an exciting elite-dangerous battle. So I added a small fan to the rift. It can turned on, when needed.
PaperMe is a tool to design papercrafts from photos. I created it in 2010 using Silverlight which seemed to become a good alternative to flash.
Unfortunately flash *and* Silverlight “died” because they are not supported on mobile devices.
So it was time for a total makeover.
It took a lot of work porting PaperMe
to HTML5 and responsive Design, but now it´s finished.
If you are interested to create a personal papercraft of yourself, your partner or your favorite celebrities – just give PaperMe a try
7. January 2015
DIY and craft
The design of the film "her" looked very pleasant to me. The use of wood for computers, lovely simple shapes and warm colors created a harmonious look.
Computer monitor design in the movie “her”
This makes even a workplace look harmonious. Especially the wooden framed monitor made a nice impression.
I've thought to myself: That may also look great on my monitor. This could perhaps make my monitor beautiful.
No sooner said than done. :-)