Andrew Burks

After a total of around 4 hours on the robot, Nico and I got the arm to work!  We have two modes: one that displays the current time, and one that will count off time from a predefined starting point.  Here are some videos of us testing at about 1:10AM on Sunday night.

I had to modify the pen and eraser holder a little bit to make it work.  I needed to make the drip area fatter, because the fingers don’t actually close all the way.  Also, I needed to mount the pen and eraser at a really close angle, because it took two seconds to rotate the tool by 90 degrees, which was unacceptable.  By adding a fancy part to the original assembly, I was able to make it all work.

The second lab in my robotic manipulation class involves telling time with the 6-axis denso robot arms.  My lab partner Nico Paris and I decided we wanted to tell time by drawing lines on a white board and erasing them.

Instead of drawing numbers, we are drawing 9 equally spaced lines radially out from a point.  No line translates to “0” and some number of lines corresponds to that digit.  There are 6 of these sets of lines, corresponding to two hours digits, two minutes digits, and two seconds digits.

In order to draw and erase lines, I got to make a cool tool for the robot to hold.  By rotating its last joint by 90 degrees the robot can switch between the pen and eraser.  What’s even cooler is the spring built in to the pen part of the assembly to allow for some compliance without totally squishing the pen!

Here is a render of the tool, and a cross section to demonstrate the compliance in the pen.  Photos and video of the final product in action are forthcoming.  We demo the design on October 18th.

Design

After bouncing off of the vibraphone keys, the ball bearings need a soft place to land and a central basin to roll into.  The basic idea behind the design was to make an upside-down umbrella, with the skeleton on the outside.  Stretching 1/4” foam between sections of aluminum angle is a cheap way to cover a lot of area.

Ball collector

Ball collector basin skeleton

Incorporation into Full Model

While previous renders imagined the 180 pieces of acrylic supporting the keys to be red, clear acrylic being about 35% cheaper prompted a slight design change.  We should save about $100 by changing to 1/8” clear acrylic.

The full vibraphone is now 4.5 feet in diameter, and should be about 3.5 feet tall.  The rim of the basin is just 2 feet off the ground, which is good because want people to be able to look into the vibraphone.

Full Vibraphone (without recirculation screw and ball distribution)

Detail view of key unit/basin interaction

While I had made some preliminary designs of the Vibratron structure a few months ago, I can now begin to finalize some of the key support structure as the ball dispensing mechanism is finalized. 

Key Unit

Experimentation showed us that the ideal location of the ball dispenser is with the tube perfectly vertical, six inches above the center of a key tilted at 45 degrees.  A modular unit consisting of 4 pieces of lasercut plastic and a gate mechanism was designed to hold the keys and gates in their proper relative positions.

Key Unit Mounting

A large sheet of 1/4” thick aluminum will be waterjet into a shape that can hold 30 of these key units.  Each unit will be attached to the aluminum by two lasercut clips which are held down by cotter pins.

30 Key Units

With 30 key units on one large piece of aluminum, the weight of the entire assembly is already at 50 pounds with a diameter of over 3 feet.  In the future, the ball recirculation system (an Archimedes screw leading into a paintball hopper) will rise out from the middle of the aluminum circle, and the ball collection system (a foam floor to catch the balls) will stick out below and around the keys.

180 pieces of plastic, over 90 of them unique

There are 6 pieces of lasercut 1/8” red acrylic in each of the 30 key units.  3 of those 6 pieces are unique.  1 of the other 3 pieces has 6 different sizes, and the final 2 are each repeated in all 30 assemblies.

Obviously I did not want to model 98 different pieces of plastic and insert them individually into models.  Fortunately, design tables in SolidWorks are very powerful.  In the end, I only needed to make 5 plastic parts and 5 obnoxious Excel spreadsheets to get an assembly (“Key Unit”) with 30 unique configurations.  Some of the plastic parts even have their note engraved into the side!